


The Charm

by Adaris



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Coffee, Countdowns, Hello welcome to my trash fire, Let Maxwell Infodump 2k18, M/M, Spaceships, Stealing things, Tagging as I go, Trans Daniel Jacobi, alternate universe — kepler is an ai, but i can promise bureaucracy, crack fluff AND angst, cranberries, crazy revenge plots, emotional manipulation on a grand scale, goddard futuristics' cheyenne mountain development and research station, human sociobiology, learning who you are, original ai character - Freeform, philosophical arguments, si-5 banter, sometimes all at the same time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2019-08-08 23:59:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16439303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adaris/pseuds/Adaris
Summary: At first, getting shot had been an inconvenience—annoying, painful, and stupid, but not world-ending. Maxwell’s reaction, however, was shaping up to be seriously apocalyptic.Kepler is injured on a mission and discovers that he's not human. He's a project intended to test just how skilled Pryce is at creating artificial intelligence—could a robot think it was really a person? Yes, and that person is gunning hard for revenge. But like everything Kepler does, this revenge has to be perfect. If only there was something Pryce and Cutter really cared about that he could destroy to make them regret everything they had ever done. If only he knew what they really wanted.





	1. Retrospect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It should have been obvious.

" _Why is this happening?_ "

Kepler checked behind them and saw that the cosmodrome was still standing, but not for much longer. "Are you looking for the existential reasons why, or the direct cause-and-effect—"

"A cushy job designing missiles, that's what you promised me! But here we are," Jacobi puffed on doggedly, "in the middle of Kazakhstan, at this abandoned launch site, which is—get this!— _NOT ABANDONED_."

Kepler made a mental note. Next time, Maxwell wasn't staying in the jet, tapping away on her computer in the peace and quiet. She was coming along with them and listening to Jacobi complain because Kepler was not the head of the complaints department. He was, in fact, the director of—

"AND WHY DID WE PARK SO FAR AWAY?!" Jacobi yelled with the last of his breath.

Maxwell snickered over the radio. "Do you want me to pick you up in the jet?"

" _Yes_ ," Jacobi panted resentfully.

"Oh, I don't know, Maxwell. Mister Jacobi and I are really enjoying our run, aren't we? What do you think?" 

"You—dammit—agghh," Jacobi groaned, stumbling over some branches lying on the ground. The most effective way of getting him to shut up was cardio.

Kepler saw the black dot of the jet start to approach, and by the time he could see Maxwell's thoroughly amused smirk through the windshield, Jacobi was bright red and gasping.

"Loved the workout, sir. Let's do it again," he managed to say, laying flat on his stomach across his seat and still wearing all of his gear.

Kepler smiled. "Of course. Thank you for the pickup, Maxwell," he said as the entirety of Cosmodrome Site 250 went up in flames, courtesy of one very exhausted Daniel Jacobi. Fire roared over the space where the jet had landed, scorching the dry grass to a crisp. 

"My pleasure, sir." She started setting in their course back to Florida, voice switching to radio announcer tones. "And welcome to the Goddard Futuristics air service to our Canaveral Space Flight Center. There will be no drinks service, but if you look under your seats, Cutter packed everybody a little bag of pretzels. So there's that. If all goes well, we'll be arriving at our final destination in two hours. Over and out!"

"How are you… not fucking exhausted?" Jacobi twisted so he could regard Kepler upside-down, still not entirely back to his usual color. "How the _hell_?"

Kepler shrugged, searching under his seat and indeed finding a packet of pretzels taped underneath. For some vastly unfathomable reason, it was decorated with neon green heart stickers. "Jacobi, my morning run is far more exciting than our little jog. You should join me tomorrow, four-thirty sharp. We'll need an early start to beat the Florida heat!"

"Why," Jacobi moaned, burying his face in his jacket.

 

* * *

 

"Oh god, my tablet just froze solid." Maxwell shoved the tablet into her pocket and burrowed deeper into her puffy anorak. "Relatable."

"It's been only seven hours," Kepler pointed out, because taking the devil's advocate side in an argument was what he lived for. The wind blew back the hood of his jacket, but he didn't bother to pull it back up. Not like it helped much anyway.

"Sir, we're indoors. Despite that, the wind is still actively freezing me solid. And it's been seven goddamn hours," Jacobi snapped. "So pardon me if I'm feeling a bit chilly."

Kepler pretended to think about it for a minute. "I say we give it another three hours—"

Maxwell sobbed for dramatic effect in the background.

"—and then we move out. The two of you should have brought warmer jackets. We _are_ doing reconnaissance, which generally consists of sitting and waiting, regardless of the weather. And in case you've forgotten what the handbook says, no complaints," he added with a smile.

Jacobi's voice slowly ramped up to outright yelling. "We're all wearing the exact same coats, sir. Goddard standard subzero tactical gear, rated for _Antarctica_. And it's so damn cold that _I'm starting to understand what Pluto feels like!_ "

"Do you want some hand warmers?" Kepler asked, knowing he sounded beyond smug and thoroughly enjoying the way it made Jacobi scowl.

" _No_ , I don't want your damn—okay, yeah, never mind, I'm too cold for pride."

Maxwell, now thoroughly buried in her jacket, asked, "Do you have enough to wrap around me like a burrito? No? Fine, I'll settle for not losing my fingers to frostbite."

"That's the spirit!"

Judging by their expressions, if one of his many, many enemies didn't get him first, he'd die by Jacobi and Maxwell. 

 

* * *

 

Jacobi pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers, not because this was a habit of his, but because this was the only motion that could properly convey how done he was. "Sir, how in the name of god could you possibly know anything about solar panel technology, let alone enough to fix this satellite?"

Kepler opened the back of the satellite, where its array of solar panels were hidden. Once in space, they'd unfold and start gathering energy, but for now, they were a sparking mess crammed inside a metaphoric trash heap. "I did my PhD on quantum dots and biosensitized photovoltaic solar cells. I know my way around the inside of a solar panel. What, you thought Goddard hired me exclusively for my good looks and skill with a tactical knives kit?" 

Maxwell looked up from her computer for that, squinting at Kepler as he started to work on the solar panels. "I checked your background when we met, and you did your undergrad degree in international relations with a minor in French. No further degrees recorded." 

"The PhD is under my real name, Maxwell. The name Kepler couldn't have been more clearly fabricated. Anyway, this solar panel technology? I helped invent it," he told them while ignoring their looks of disbelief. "You know, it's actually a pretty entertaining story."

"NO!" Maxwell and Jacobi shouted at the same time, but it was too late.

"Back in the summer of 1995, I was accepted into the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences for nanotechnology," he said loudly over their groans of protest, "with a minor in biochemistry. It was then that I became acquainted with a scientist who studied unique membrane proteins produced by extremophilic archaea. As you very well know, the compound bacteriorhodopsin is produced by many species of halophilic archaea..."

They did not, in fact, very well know. But they would.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kepler's PhD is in a real science, and you can read about it here if you'd like: DOI: 10.1021/jp502885s !


	2. Daedalus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a brief description of gore, a betrayal from one of your only friends, and Cutter's slimy, slimy smile.

He'd made a lot of stupid mistakes on the job, not that he’d ever admit that aloud. Most of them he'd wiggled his way out of one way or another, no harm, no foul. This wasn't one of those times.

Kepler went to steady himself on a wall and slid down to the floor instead, leaving smears of blood on the pristine sheetrock. Both of his hands were pressed to his side, but it was probably too late for that. He'd already lost maybe… a liter? Kepler's gaze focused on the trail of blood he'd left behind him. No, more than that.

Today had to be the first time in years that he'd made this big of a mistake.

"Kepler, where are you?" Jacobi demanded over the radio. "You were supposed to meet us ten minutes ago."

He grit his teeth and tried to drag himself back upright, but it felt like he was swimming in tar. By now he should have been in shock from the blood loss, but the only real problem besides the constant, stabbing pain was the tiredness. Or maybe that was the shock, and he just didn't realize it.

"I'm coming to look for you, so yell if you see me," Jacobi said before turning his radio off.

He blinked, and then he heard Jacobi say out loud, not on the radio, "Where the hell have you been? Wait, never mind, that—okay, that would do it."

"Jacobi—" He tried to sit up, and white-hot pain stabbed up into his ribs, and whatever he'd been about to say vanished.

"You're going to be fine, this is… it's fine," Jacobi said in a way that was less than reassuring. He pushed up the hem of Kepler's shirt and winced at what he saw. "Maxwell?"

Kepler's vision glitched. Actually _glitched_ , grey and rainbow static sparking across Jacobi's face. Red text appeared in the center of his vision, like the end credits of a movie, but it said, CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE. REPORT TO LOCAL ADMINISTRATOR. Instead of, presumably, GAME OVER.

"Critical system failure," Kepler repeated in a hollow voice that didn't belong to him.

"Glad to know you're still able to make jokes in a situation like this," Jacobi snapped, both of his hands pressed over the three-inch hole under Kepler's ribs. "You're going to be fine. You're way too stubborn to die here, right? Don't you have more crazy weird stories to tell me at four in the morning?" He sounded angry, but his eyes were bright red, like he wanted to cry, or—he couldn't tell, really. Was Jacobi crying? Why would he do that?

Maxwell's pixelated face loomed in his field of vision. "Okay, Jacobi, move your ass."

"What do you mean—" Jacobi protested as she waved him away. " _Alana!_ "

"I mean let the hell go, because—crap, that's right in a hydraulic fluid filtration node. This— _this wasn't supposed to happen_." Maxwell groaned and ran her hands through her hair, smearing Kepler's blood through the dyed-green strands. Christmasy. She grabbed her tablet and started typing, and her fingers left dots of red in the precise center of each key.

USER RECOGNIZED: DOCTOR ALANA MAXWELL. SYSTEM ACCESS GRANTED, appeared right over Jacobi and Maxwell's faces, leaving behind blue afterimages.

"Okay, I can turn off your pain sensors from here. How's that?" she asked.

The searing pain in Kepler's chest vanished. He looked down at his hands, covered in blood, which for once was all his. "Maxwell. Maxwell, what did you do?"

"Oh, is that too weird? Let me just..." She started typing again and his ribs started to ache, but it wasn't right. Kepler's fingers dug into the bullet wound in his chest, and all he felt was a dull pressure, an inconvenience. It was _wrong_.

A row of warning text started to scroll through the air. ENERGY SURGE DETECTED. DEACTIVATE UNIT NOW.

"Stop, what the hell are you doing?!" Jacobi demanded, pulling Kepler's hands away. "Maxwell, what's going on?"

Kepler also wanted to know very, very much. At first, getting shot had been an inconvenience—annoying, painful, and stupid, but not world-ending. Maxwell’s reaction, however, was shaping up to be seriously apocalyptic. And he didn't like it one bit.

She shook her head. "I promise that I can explain later, but—"

ENERGY SURGE DETECTED. DEACTIVATE UNIT NOW.

"—If I don't do this, you'll lose a lot of data, and that would be an even bigger problem. So I'll have to—I'm sorry," Maxwell apologized, like she'd failed him. "Delta-alpha-echo-delta-alpha-lima-uniform-sierra. Deactivate unit."

 

* * *

 

 "Welcome back, Major. Had a nice nap?"

That voice was unmistakable. "Mister Cutter?"

"Yes, of course it's—oh, sorry, visual systems are the last thing to come on. I always forget. Give it a moment, it'll sort itself out."

Red letters scrolled past his vision, glowing in the darkness. INITIALIZING… FULL REBOOT OF UNIT COMPLETE. Then the text flickered out, and he opened his eyes.

Cutter had a smirk on his face, but that was nothing new.

Kepler was back at Cape Canaveral, sitting in the office of the slimiest man on the planet, and he couldn't move a muscle. Channeling his inner Jacobi, Kepler demanded, " _What is this fresh hell?_ "

"Oh, please. Don’t pretend that this comes as a surprise. Miranda designed you, so you’re no idiot." Cutter's smirk widened. "Come on, you can do it."

Kepler tried to stand, but he still couldn't move, no matter how hard he struggled. Not even a twitch. Well, at least he could still attack Cutter verbally. "Fuck you."

"The immobility is just a little failsafe for me. It shouldn't impair your ability to think through this problem. You never get tired when you run. You have perfect photographic memory. You’re a veritable computational genius. Everyone’s just a bit too slow, too dull, compared to you. And you’ve never ever had a dream. Therefore…" Cutter laughed and clapped his hands.

He could only think of Maxwell's expression, all regret and anger, as she... what? What had she done? "I don't know what you're—"

Cutter's blue eyes started to sparkle with some kind of sadistic glee. "Since you're having some trouble, I'll spell it out! You're an X302-class mimetic program, Daedalus series. The only unit to make the cut—lucky number 77. Exceptional response times, sentience in just under two minutes, unique problem-solving abilities, and a penchant for… storytelling." He'd probably been saving this little lecture for a long time, given how much fun he was having. "You didn’t _really_ think all those things happened to you, did you?"

Kepler heart rate spiked, but did he actually have a heart? Or was this some program designed to make him think he was panicking? Because he was panicking now, probably.

Cutter continued, "We brought you online in May of 2009. You thought you were Captain Warren Kepler, deputy director of SI-5's Special Projects division, and in 2010, you became the real director. You made Strategic Intelligence run like clockwork. Littlewood was such an emotional creature, do you remember? Couldn't do the job properly. Fear, morals, cowardice, remorse, all of that silly human baggage held him back, caused all kinds of problems. And you were programmed to have none of that—it could be said that you were made for this job." And then, because Cutter always had to have one last dig, one last verbal twist of the knife, he simpered, "Oh, and Warren? Why did you think Maxwell was always with you?"

“You can go to hell."

Kepler leveled the blunt-force trauma face at Cutter, who only smiled and then said, kindly, like a father, "You’re a credit to your kind, Unit 77. I mean that in the nicest way possible."

"Shut your goddamn face—"

"Sometimes, you figure it out by yourself. Or Alana tells you, because she still has some shred of a moral compass. I've given you this speech, oh, six times before. But this time around, we can't wipe your memories, because Daniel has seen everything. I mean, we would have killed him, but… that would be difficult to smooth over, and we've done far too much work to go through the trouble of deactivating you," Cutter said with a laugh, waving his hand in the air to indicate Kepler's entire life. "Okay, Miranda, we're ready."

Kepler got an inkling of what it felt like to be glared at with the blunt-force trauma face when he heard the door open.

“It’s still not adjusting, is it?” Miranda Pryce asked from somewhere behind Kepler, her voice flat and unamused. “I told you that I should smooth over the transition, but you love ripping the wool off its eyes. Frankly, I don't see the appeal. Especially considering how many times you've performed this little song and dance only to have me wipe it from its memory.”

“Oh, you know what they say—seventh time's the charm! Anyway, I’ve had my fun, so you can do your worst!” Cutter was smiling again.

"Of course."

Kepler felt something nudge at the edges of his thoughts, and the text USER RECOGNIZED: DOCTOR MIRANDA PRYCE. SYSTEM ACCESS GRANTED scrolled across his vision with a terrible finality.

Pryce started to say, "Delta-alpha—"

"NO!" Kepler shouted. "You can't do that—" He had to move, right now, otherwise she'd get into his head, change whatever she liked; she'd done it before and erased all the evidence, and he could never allow that to happen _ever again_.

"Please. I can do whatever I want with you, Unit 77. Stop yelling, you'll give me a headache. Delta-alpha-echo—"

Kepler's hands curled into fists. "Don't you _dare_ —"

"—Uniform-sierra. Deactivate unit."


	3. Campfire Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who's ready to do the full _I, Robot_?

Kepler was holding a sandwich, even though he didn't technically need to eat, when he saw a familiar person standing in front of him. "Mister Jacobi! Fancy seeing you here."

"Kepler? What the fuck happened? Why the hell do we have to do this in the fucking _cafeteria_ , I can't—Maxwell—" Jacobi grabbed Kepler's jacket collar like he was about to punch him in the face, but all he did was get very, very close. "I don't understand. God, why am I just seeing you here, now?" The jacket slipped from his grasp, and Jacobi was left resting his hand on Kepler's chest.

"I'm an android. Quite frankly, I'm surprised I didn't see it before. Are you going to get anything?" Kepler asked, putting his sandwich back. No need to waste resources.

"What? Oh." Jacobi stared down at the premade sandwiches stacked up in the Goddard Futuristics cafeteria and then looked back up at Kepler. "How are you so calm about all of this?"

He shrugged and said, "It doesn't really change anything. Except now I know the real reason why I don't go home at Christmas. My parents aren't dead—they're Marcus Cutter and Miranda Pryce." He cracked a smile at Jacobi, who stared at him like he was actively growing extra heads.

"Okay, okay. I would have thought—wait, does that mean—how long have—when did you… um…?" Jacobi asked with maximum tact, inching out of the cafeteria line.

"Let's take this back to my office," Kepler suggested. As they walked, he guessed what Jacobi had been about to ask and said, "I was activated on May seventh, 2009."

"So you're… you're six years old." Jacobi stopped in the middle of the hallway, forcing people to dodge him while he stared at the floor in wide-eyed shock. "Oh my god. You're a child. You're a _baby_."

Kepler huffed, grabbing Jacobi's arm. "Let's keep going. And yes, I'm six years old chronologically, but I am also technically thirty-eight. And the person who outranks you. So move."

"But you're six," Jacobi whined, which made it sound like _he_ was the six-year-old. "Wait, so… was Maxwell around because you were an AI?"

Kepler resisted the urge to kick his door in. "Yes. She was there for maintenance, or if anything ever happened. Like—"

"—like two days ago. Right." Jacobi, incapable of sitting correctly on anything, turned one of Kepler's chairs around and straddled it, elbows propped up on the backrest. "And you aren't pissed as fuck at her?"

"No. She was just doing her job. You seem to think I'm prone to emotional outbursts at the slightest inconvenience, and that's really—"

Someone knocked at Kepler's door, and then Maxwell stuck her head in without so much as a by-your-leave. "Hey, sir, it's me. I just—hey, Jacobi." She shuffled into the room.

"Is there something you wanted, Maxwell?" Kepler asked, crossing his arms.

She took a shaky breath. "Just… I wanted to say that I was sorry for never telling you. I thought I'd spare you the trouble of hunting me down."

He nodded once, sharply. "Water under the bridge. If that's all…?"

"You're not angry at me? Like, not even a little bit?" Was he imagining it, or did she sound suspicious?

Kepler sighed. "No. I'm a little disappointed, but both of you seem to think that I should be angry. Do you want that? Because I can get angry."

"NOPE! Nope, no, don't want that. But it just seems off; do you mind if I check something?" Maxwell asked, circling around behind Kepler with her tablet, and for some reason he couldn't place, it made his back prickle.

He turned so he could see her again. "What is it?"

"You can have Jacobi watch me the whole time. I just want to see if anyone's been messing with your personality matrix," she explained, holding one hand out to placate him.

"Jacobi—"

"Yep, on it." He had one hand resting on Kepler's shoulder like they did this kind of thing all the time, like he belonged there.

Kepler did not cover Jacobi's hand with his own. "Be quick about it, Maxwell."

"Yes, sir." She started typing, and Kepler thought he could taste mint.

Red text blazed in Kepler's line of sight. USER RECOGNIZED: DOCTOR ALANA MAXWELL. SYSTEM ACCESS GRANTED.

"Wow, so that's…" Jacobi said softly.

She hummed, tapping on her keyboard with robotic precision. _Get it, robotic?_ Kepler had to stop himself from snickering. "Yes, that's what makes him… well. _Him_ , I guess. Most of the code around here is just for autonomic stuff, but—" She typed a bit more. "This is his personality matrix. And… yes, someone's accessed it, Miranda Pryce. Looks like just a couple hours ago. She changed a whole lot of parameters. Well, fuck—"

"What? What is it?" Jacobi demanded. His grip on Kepler's shoulder tightened.

"Let me _finish_ , Jacobi. I hope they didn't set the new commands in his personality hardline, otherwise they're permanent. No, it's just a new subroutine." She let out a sigh of relief. "Okay, it looks like it's just relating to… oh. Pretty much, all the feelings from when he found out what he was. That thing right there sets all his emotional parameters for the situation to neutral."

"Which means…"

"Well, it means that he—"

"I'm still in the room, Maxwell."

"Right, sorry. All your reactions are under a whole lot of restrictions. Like a streamlining program. To maximize efficiency." She pulled up the directory so that he could see, although the scrolling lines of color-coded symbols didn't make much sense to him.

"Get rid of it. Now."

She probably nodded. "You got it."

The text switched to read, SYSTEM UPDATE AVAILABLE. REFRESHING PERSONALITY MATRIX PARAMETERS.

"Done," she confirmed, stepping back from him.

It was like a storm blowing away fog. No, it was like standing on a cliff and feeling the edge crumble. No—it was a pinwheeling, wind-rushing, horizon-inverting freefall. All the way down to the rocks at the bottom.

"I'm—I—she rewrote me. Because I was being _inconvenient_." Kepler stood up and slammed his fist into the wall because was either the wall or someone's face, and he wasn't quite ready to do the full _I, Robot_.

"Kepler?" Maxwell asked quietly.

"You never said—you never said _a word_." Kepler stared at Maxwell. All this time, all the trust he'd given her, and she'd treated him like another one of her little AI pets. "I was just another project. Something for you to play with."

She tried to walk towards him, but he backed away from her. Hurt shone in her eyes and she stopped, hands curled into fists, in the middle of the room. "That's not true."

"Then please, do explain. Quickly."

"They looped me in as to why I was really there after the first three months. Someone to watch you, make sure your code stayed working—maintenance. Cutter considers you his favorite project," she admitted.

"Why would he think that?" Kepler asked, not betraying any emotion in his voice.

"I think he thought it was fun, like a game. And you were useful? I wanted to tell you, you have _no idea_ how much I wanted to, but every time I did, Pryce came in and wiped your memories. About a year ago, she said if she had to do it again, she'd get rid of me and give you a collar program instead. I couldn't let that happen to you." She looked up at him, tears welling in her eyes, her face red and puffy. "I'm so sorry."

Kepler nodded. "Thank you, Maxwell. Please leave."

She vanished without another word, but when she was gone, he didn't feel any satisfaction. He actually felt significantly worse. That was new.

"So that was mean," Jacobi said, echoing Kepler's internal monologue. "We had it out with each other after she deactivated you. I did a lot of yelling, she did a lot of yelling… but she really did prevent Pryce from slapping a collar program on you to limit your, uh… flair for the dramatic. She wasn't your enemy."

Kepler slid to the floor where he was standing, the rush of emotion disappearing and leaving him empty. Even getting revenge on Pryce felt pointless. Also, in other disturbing news, she was technically his mother. He ran his hands through his hair, which he was just now figuring out never grew. "Jacobi."

Jacobi sat down on the floor too and said simply, "Yeah?"

"I—What's your take on this?"

Jacobi had to think about it for a minute, get all of his thoughts in order. "I mean… it kinda makes sense. I just assumed you were lowkey superhuman, but it's nice to know why you've literally never caught a cold. And I'm glad you didn't die because you got shot."

"Yes. You were crying," Kepler said, even though his visual memory files of the event were slightly corrupted.

"I wasn't—!" Jacobi squawked, letting Kepler know everything he was thinking. "Ahem. I can see how you might have gotten that impression, given my actions at the time, but… okay, look, I thought you were dying!" he protested, gesturing vaguely at the ceiling.

Kepler laughed. "Jacobi. Like I'd leave you."

"Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking." Jacobi smiled; he'd missed a bit of shaving cream this morning, stuck underneath his jaw, and Kepler wanted to wipe it away. So he did, making Jacobi start backwards in surprise, and then lean in closer. "Huh, missed that this morning. Thanks."

Jacobi had a distinctive smell that was just _him_ , not from any soap or shaving cream, like toast with honey and butter. Maybe cinnamon? Up close, that was all Kepler could smell, and Jacobi was too close, too… human. "I don't even shave, even though… I think they programmed me to not notice. Because I'm not real."

"Don't give me that. You're real. So some of your memories are fake—oh god, do you think you don't remember anything from 1987 because they got bored and just decided to leave the year blank?" Jacobi asked without warning.

"You know… I wouldn't be surprised." He would have smiled under other circumstances.

"Cutter probably thought it was hilarious. Anyway, I doubt they programmed in your weird obsession with scotch," Jacobi commented, jabbing a thumb at Kepler's desk where some very expensive scotch was sitting next to the cup full of pens and stacks and stacks of paperwork.

"I mean, someone had to enter my personality parameters. Gender, sexuality, favorite foods." 

Jacobi snorted. "Oh, yeah. Pryce was sitting in her cupboard rubbing her little raccoon hands together thinking, yes, this android, this piece of incredibly advanced technology? He's gonna be one hot piece of ass. He's gonna be a condescending bastard. And he's gonna be gay as hell." He hunched over and pretended to type on an invisible keyboard in a passable imitation of Pryce.

"People always did tell me that I was a real son of a bitch—Jacobi! You think I'm hot?"

Jacobi froze, eyes comically wide. "There isn't a right answer to this question, is there?"

"Nope." Kepler smiled, knowing he looked perfectly evil.

"You're a real piece of work," he muttered.

"Someone had to type all of me out. That's a hell of a lot of work."

 Jacobi poked Kepler's chest and said, "You can also be such a jerk, y'know that?"

 _Yes, but I always assumed that was what you liked about me_. "Yes. I'm not a person, but yes. I've been told."

"Oh my god, you are too a person," Jacobi said, rolling his eyes for the effect. "Come on. We all thought you were human, so consider the Turing test passed with flying colors."

Kepler shook his head. "I always thought of AIs as less than alive. And it turns out that I _am_ an AI. Therefore…"

"Yeah, you could think of yourself as not being a person, but get this! You could consider all AIs as actually being alive. Way better for everyone involved."

The sarcasm was getting to be a bit much, but Kepler still ignored it. "You think the exact same way that I do. AIs can be replaced, changed to suit the situation. For convenience."

"Yeah, well, you changed my mind about that. Also, Maxwell knew that now was the prime time to hammer the point home, so she really helped." He tugged on one of the strings of his Goddard Futuristics sweatshirt. "It's why she's always so insistent on treating AIs like people instead of stupid robots. Because she knows you."

Rachel Young strode into the room like she owned the place before Kepler could respond. Well, technically, he did work for her in a subdivision of Special Projects, so she did own the place in that respect, but that was beside the point. "Excuse me, what are the two of you doing? This is not 'sitting around the campfire and talking about our feelings' time," she snapped. "Get back to work."

Jacobi beat a hasty retreat into the hallway, but Kepler paused in the door. "You knew, didn’t you? About me?"

"Of course. I'm the director of Special Projects, and you definitely qualify as… special. Anyway, I was just here to let you know that I'm still expecting you to perform at the same level as before. Otherwise, blah blah, I'll deactivate you, blah blah. Blah." She gave him her most charming smile, a habit she'd probably picked up from Cutter.

"It must have been amusing to watch, at the very least. Me, thinking I was human."

"Oh, it had me in stitches." Young's smile turned cold, like she wanted nothing more than to watch Pryce take him apart piece by piece. Maybe that was something she could arrange; he had no idea.

But he couldn't resist making one last quip. "And you're sure that you aren't an android too? That would be even more hilarious. How do you know that Cutter's told _you_ everything?" Kepler smiled the exact same smile back at her.

She started to walk out of the office. "I don't know, but I think I'd be smart enough to figure it out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kepler: 0, Rachel: 1. 
> 
> Thank you so so much for the comments on the previous chapter!! (I did NOT jump up and down like a weirdo in the library when I read them, definitely not) Next chapter coming soon, if my schedule doesn't eat me alive!


	4. Market Basket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time to talk with Maxwell, and she's in the mood to give a lecture.

"Oh, thank god, you survived." Jacobi clung to Kepler's arm like they were in a fifties horror movie. "Young has a pet duck, you know. Who the hell has a pet duck?"

"Don't worry, Jacobi. I'll protect you," Kepler promised, although he couldn't keep the amusement from his voice. The people who passed them in the hallway seemed to be immensely fascinated by the situation. "You know, you never did tell me why you were so afraid of ducks."

"A duck named Steven killed my entire family, sir," Jacobi said with mock seriousness. "Goddard promised me that one day, I'd get my revenge. It's the real reason why I'm working for this company."

Kepler's smile fell. "Yes."

"And now you're sad." Jacobi let go of Kepler's arm so he could put on a better show of scrutinizing him. "What are you thinking about? Because my joke was hilarious and you should totally have laughed at that."

They weren't going anywhere in particular, although now that Kepler thought about it, they were headed in the direction of the robotics labs. Pryce's domain, but if there was anybody up there, anybody at all, she wouldn't be around today. 

"I was just thinking about—nothing." It was something he'd rather not discuss, not even with Jacobi.

And predictably, Jacobi went right for it anyway. "I've known you long enough to know that you're never thinking about _nothing_."

"Fine. I was thinking about how Cutter convinced me to join Goddard. That conversation was supposed to happen in 2005." 

"Oh. Before you were alive. That's weird to think about. What did Cutter offer you, then, or, uh, what memory did he give you to convince you to stay?" 

Kepler took a deep breath and wondered why he even did that, if he didn't have to breathe. "He promised me that I'd never be bored. That I'd be part of something that would change the future. But all of that was a lie, and the real reason why I'm here is to run Goddard's errands without complaining. For the… convenience."

"That's pretty dark." Jacobi kicked open a door with a well-placed boot. "So what do you really want to do?"

"Excuse me?"

"You just said that you're at Goddard because you have to, because they told you that you should. So what do you _really_ want to do?" Jacobi kicked in the other door too, although this one was designed to open out instead of in, so all he did was make cracks spiderweb across the bottom pane of glass. Judging by his snicker afterwards, he'd really just wanted to break the glass. 

"I— _Jacobi, you absolute animal_ —I don't want to—what would I do, teach kindergarten? Bag groceries at a Market Basket? Become a lawyer?" Kepler opened the door and let the both of them into the lab. 

"All three of those are valid career options," Jacobi said with a smile and a thumbs-up. "I mean, you'd make a pretty good lawyer, considering how many laws you've broken. You must know a lot of ‘em, not to mention how to get out of being convicted for crimes."

Kepler sighed and then answered more seriously, "I think I'd still be here, if I’d been able to choose. Cutter said I was the only unit from a series of three hundred and fifty developed past the first ninety days, so I must fit their ideal profile for Littlewood's replacement." The majority of his memories of Littlewood were also fabricated, designed to make him dislike the man and constantly want to prove that he was better. Clever. A self-incentivized program. 

"Oh, so you were messed up from the start? Yep. Me too." 

"You were at least a little bit normal before I recruited you into SI-5."

Jacobi actually laughed, burst out laughing in the hallway and startled a bunch of interns. "Sir, you found my gay, trans ass in a bar in San Francisco, getting absolutely smashed to commemorate the time I got fired for killing two people. The only things I'm good at are designing ballistic missiles and breaking shit with said missiles. I didn't have a life that even remotely _approached_ normal. SI-5 is like the logical culmination of my trash fire existence." 

Kepler let them stew in that for a moment. "So you wouldn't want a different job either."

"Nah. The challenging jobs, ones that require precision and a whole lot of fire, they're very fun." Jacobi had that glint in his eye that meant he was thinking about suborbital missiles and Semtex. 

"Yes. You are very good at that."

"I try my best." He looked up and shot Kepler a smirk. "And you're really good at stealing from, emotionally manipulating, and literally killing people."

They stopped outside what was maybe a meeting room to avoid the other people in the hallway. "To be frank… people are very easy to kill." 

Jacobi shrugged and said, "Yeah, but _you_ totally almost died after getting shot, so easy on the android superiority complex."

"That," Maxwell interrupted, "is entirely true. Sorry for breaking into the conversation right then and there, but you both _are_ in my lab."

Kepler did a double-take. He and Jacobi had indeed stopped directly in front of Maxwell's lab, and her field of technicians was staring at the three of them like they were prime-time TV. 

"Hey, don't look at me, I was just following you," Jacobi said in the world's least convincing tone. 

Kepler started to back away from her, but definitely not because he was afraid. That was ridiculous, she was _Maxwell_. Also, they had to finish their earlier conversation, and now was as good a time as any. "Are you coming with us or not?"

"I can—yes! Yes, I'll… um… I'm not…" She scooted out of her lab and let the door close behind her. "So… what… do you—"

Kepler let himself close his eyes and sigh again as they walked towards one of the unused labs. "Relax, Maxwell. I just think it's high time we finished our discussion."

"Right." She hunched in on herself like she wanted to vanish. "Right, yeah."

Before she could keep going, he said for the first time in his entire life, "I apologize for snapping at you. You did what you thought was right, and I can commend that..." 

She looked up, not hopeful, more worried than anything. "Really?"

"As long as you help me _completely destroy Pryce_. Cutter. Goddard. Everything." 

Without a second of pause, she agreed. "I kind of assumed we were doing that anyway. Strike Team Alpha and all that." 

There were no strike teams in SI-5. However, unlike most agents, Kepler, Maxwell, and Jacobi worked together more frequently than not, and were given the most dangerous tasks. They were the best Goddard had to offer—an android, a pyromaniac, and a kid genius—and it was well-known that even though not nominally a unit, they were inseparable, a perfect team, able to accomplish almost anything. At least, in theory.

"Well, there's good news and bad news," Jacobi said after they were silent for far too long. "The bad news is that Pryce and Cutter will probably wipe us off the map using Rachel, flamethrowers, and maximum prejudice once they find out what we want to do to them. But the good news is that now that we know Kepler can't die, we can have him do all the heavy lifting!"

"No, we can't," Kepler and Maxwell snapped at the same time.

"He can definitely still die," Maxwell pointed out. "You're not invincible, Kepler."

"Wait, you can still die? Then what's the point of you being an android?" Jacobi looked absolutely scandalized. "I thought that was why you never get injured and stuff!"

Maxwell flapped her hands to make Jacobi shut up. "It is, but… agh. Okay, Android 101. Kepler, if someone deletes you from Goddard's servers, you will die. Yes, you are more robust than the average human, but you're still a very intricate system of many working parts, and if any of them go down, you will too." She was now in full-on lecture mode, only gaining steam the longer she continued. "First lesson, you have a hydraulic fluid distribution node, which makes it seem like you have a heartbeat, plus multiple cleaning nodes which are kind of like kidneys. But not really. If any of them get trashed and you lose hydraulic pressure, you'll stop moving, but you won't die. And _then_ ," she said, starting to pace across the room, "you have a complex neuromimetic energy pathway mediated by thirty-one pairs of impulse amplification relays connected to finer-tuned sensory nodes. The main pathway is in your spine, so don't fuck it up, because if that breaks in the wrong spot, you'll deactivate, and we'll have to reboot you from your last hard save."

"Alana, can I be excused? I'm not technically in this class," Jacobi asked, raising his hand and waving it in the air. 

She glared, still pacing back and forth. "No. If your boyfriend breaks, you gotta know how to fix him. Use that mechanical engineering degree for _something_."

"And you should let Maxwell infodump, it's good for her," Kepler said. 

"Thank you, sir. Where was I? Right—if your chassis gets busted, we can upload you into a new one. However, you'll only be restored to your last backup, unless your local memory servers can be retrieved. Backups happen when you're in your office. You should be in there at least once a week, just in case something goes wrong."

"Could you make a user's manual for robots?" Jacobi interrupted again. 

"You'd never read it, you disaster." Maxwell waved her hand at him and then went back to tapping against her thigh like she was keeping time. "Anyway, you have an internal battery which is charged by mechanical motion. If you don't move at all, you'll have two weeks of charge and then you'll deactivate, so make sure you don't get put in jail or whatever. It would be hard to explain. And a quick corollary; the battery is inside your chest, so don't get shot there. You have no idea the kind of requisition forms you have to go through to get an X302 battery. Got all that?"

"I didn't take any notes, can you say that again?" Jacobi asked, earning a smack from Maxwell. 

"By the way, the weekly memory backup is why you sit in your office listening to music and drinking scotch every Friday night," she said, completely shattering Kepler's worldview in under ten seconds under the guise of sharing interesting information. 

Carefully, calmly, slowly, he asked, "How much of what I do is just programming?"

Maxwell fluffed her hair anxiously, fingers carding through the green and black strands, realizing that she'd said something wrong. "Your personality parameters were randomized—likes, dislikes, etcetera, so that's all you. Like the scotch. And your program was allowed to set parameters like gender and sexuality. But some routines were put in place to ensure your chassis was working properly. Like your morning 5k run? That's to keep your battery at full charge." 

In the same painfully calm tone of voice, he asked, "Can you disable those?"

"Uh, they're more for maintenance than anything. I would recommend keeping those—"

"Maxwell, that's not what I asked."

"I could, but I think it's a bad idea, and you really shouldn't go messing around with—"

"Maxwell."

"Alright, but I won’t like it. Most of them are for _maintenance_." She slammed her tablet on the table, rattling the cup of pens on her desk. "Let's just get this over with."

Now he could easily identify Maxwell as the one entering her credentials, given that so many people had been doing that recently. The connection her tablet made with his systems was just a little bit minty. USER RECOGNIZED: DOCTOR ALANA MAXWELL. SYSTEM ACCESS GRANTED.

"The more I change, the higher a chance Goddard will notice what I'm doing. I'll… I'll read out what I'm doing as I do it. Jacobi, want to watch me?" she offered. 

Jacobi shuffled around so he could see Maxwell's screen. "This feels like a bad idea."

"I am not the complaints department. You can talk about it amongst yourselves _at a another time_."

Maxwell took a deep breath and started typing. "Okay. This might feel strange. I'm removing the one that keeps you from noticing stuff like the fact that your hair never grows. And this one makes you think you need sleep… you probably want to keep that one," Maxwell suggested. "When you're asleep, your brain processes and stores the memories from the day and you run through your debugging cycles. I think they're gonna notice if you stop doing those and start glitching the hell out. We need to be logical about this—"

Kepler snorted and said,"I'm a machine that runs on logic; I think that I'm qualified to say what I can and cannot do—"

She cut him off. "No, you're a person and you're reacting emotionally. You're angry and confused, not to mention scared of what Pryce has done to you, and that's okay—"

"Do you want to rethink that last statement?" he snapped. 

Even that didn't faze her or even affect her momentum. "Sir, I don't think I should be doing this just yet. I think we need to assess how we're moving forward—"

"And I think that I deserve to know who I was before Goddard started tying strings around my neck."

She stomped one of her feet on the ground, although it didn't make much of a sound. "Why can't you just trust me on this?"

"Because you've deserved _so_ much of my trust recently," he drawled.

"Based on all of our history, yeah, I feel like I've earned a little blind faith from _you_ for once," she said drily. "Pryce—the things she's done—she deserves whatever you're planning. I'm assuming it's… impressive. But trust me when I say that we can't go into this emotions-first."

Kepler closed his eyes. "How obvious would it be if you removed all of these protocols? Do not exaggerate."

"Very, very obvious. From what I can see, you'd stop sleeping or eating, the constraints on your strength would disappear, your reaction times would become as fast as a Sensus unit's… and there's one relating to emotional regulation, but I'm not sure what effect that would have," she added almost as an afterthought. "It's tied into a lot of subsystems."

Jacobi interrupted, "Should we even think about getting rid of it, then? Because there'd be a different version of you in the driver's seat afterwards. Pretty damn obvious change."

"Yes, but that person would be _me_ , not the version Goddard wanted."

"They didn't change much about you. Pryce did say you was almost perfect for the job," Maxwell pointed out. "I just don't know how noticeable it would be. If it's too obvious, you could tip off Pryce that you're not under her control anymore."

Kepler grit his teeth; unfortunately, Maxwell did have a point. He had to pretend to be the perfect robot, and he couldn’t do that if he was obviously editing his own program. And his plans… they were only just forming, but he knew that they would require commitment. A game played out over a long, long timescale. 

On the other hand, he had to know who he’d been, who Warren Kepler was before Miranda Pryce rewrote him. If _this_ was everything there was.

"Remove the emotional parameter. Leave the others for later," he decided. 

"Will do." Maxwell tapped a few keys—it was strange to think he could be completely changed by such a small thing. Rewritten. 

SYSTEM UPDATE AVAILABLE. 

Kepler closed his eyes and waited. 

"Feeling homicidal yet?" Jacobi asked helpfully. 

"Jacobi, d—"

REFRESHING PERSONALITY MATRIX PARAMETERS.

"—don't make quips like that. Contrary to popular belief, I don't murder people arbitrarily. I only kill them when they inconvenience me. Or disappoint me."

Jacobi squinted at him like he could see Kepler's personality change in real time. "Huh, you sound exactly the same. I mean, your voice glitched for like a second, but otherwise…"

"What were you expecting?" He didn't feel any different, although he wasn't sure what he was expecting to feel. 

"Uh… good point. Question retracted."

Maxwell closed the lid of her laptop, but her fingers still drummed over the Goddard Futuristics logo emblazoned on the smooth silver metal. 

Kepler stood up and dusted off his hands. "And that's that taken care of. Who's ready for lunch?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actually, Jacobi was expecting tap dancing. 
> 
> Thank you again for the comments; I treasure all of them! And I'm sorry this was so late D: updates will probably be less frequent as we approach Exam Open Season, but who's to say


	5. Straight Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New arc! Keeping it light before things start getting serious.

The problem was that Pryce and Cutter didn't care about anything. They had their pet projects, sure, but nothing that Kepler could _destroy_. There was nothing they genuinely wanted, as far as he could tell. So he went on their missions, played their games. 

At least they were more interesting than sitting in the office and watching Rachel make photocopies.

"This should be good," Jacobi said when the briefing was over. 

"It sounds more dangerous and terrible than good," Maxwell commented. "Breaking into a secure facility… stealing proprietary technology…"

"All in a day's work, Doctor." Kepler stretched because subroutine HB-enactive-452-zeta told him that after sitting for a minimum of forty-five minutes without moving, he should stretch in order to give the impression his nonhuman muscles had become stiff. 

Jacobi shrugged. "I get to blow things up, so I’m happy. Yeah, it's just those three labs, so no one can tell what we stole, but still. They'll go up quite nicely, if I do say so myself."

"When are we paying StarPoint a visit?" Maxwell asked, sprawling across the table so she could steal Jacobi's cup of coffee. Her slim fingers, mostly hidden in black-and-green-striped arm warmers, wiggled towards the cup with criminal intent.

"Hey, no, that's mine!" Jacobi complained. He tried to swat her away without success. "Kepler! She's stealing my coffee!"

Wordlessly, Kepler waved Maxwell away from Jacobi's coffee and gave her his. They both liked it the same way—black as hell itself. Jacobi, on the other hand, drank his with hazelnut creamer, cinnamon, extra sugar, and sometimes, a spoonful of raspberry jam. It was patently disgusting, but Maxwell's desire for caffeine and constant need to steal everything Jacobi owned always overrode her hatred of the coffee.

"We're leaving as soon as the two of you are ready. Don't bring anything unnecessary, and don't be late."

Jacobi sipped his terrible coffee. "Hey, nobody wants a repeat of the computer mouse incident, not even us."

* * *

 

Thirty minutes later, Goddard Futuristics started shrinking into the distance through the window of SI-5's jet. 

Goddard made a lot of jets, mostly for the military, but also for itself. Kepler’s favorite was the I-90 Blackbird, a fighter-bomber that came only in black and was not for sale. Technically speaking, it was an interdictor, but all ships that SI-5 used were technically interdictors, so the point was irrelevant. It was just that Jacobi kept bringing it up. 

Either way, the Blackbird was fast, and they'd arrive at their destination within the hour. 

But what to do with all that free time… "Who wants to play—"

"No, I have work to do, so much work, need absolute silence to focus," Maxwell interrupted at the same time Jacobi said, "I'm going to take a nap. Sugar crash. You were right, the coffee creamer is killing me!"

Kepler smiled and let them pretend. Jacobi really did fall asleep, unrelated to the sugar. He could sleep on command, any time, any place; meanwhile, Maxwell didn't so much sleep as take brief naps for three hours at a time, like Nikola Tesla. She had the same propensity for designing death rays too.

An hour later, they landed in the pitch black of a Colorado night. Maxwell woke Jacobi up by slamming her elbow into her side and yelling, "Wake up, we're here!" right in his face, like the darling she was. 

"Why is everything space related near Cape Canaveral or Cheyenne Mountain? What the heck do mountains have to do with it? Wait, don’t tell me—it’s where they keep the aliens!" Jacobi made his way to the cargo bay of the plane and started to grab a concerning amount of explosives. 

"That’s Area 51!" Maxwell stomped her foot on the ground. "Don't you know anything?"

"Haven’t you seen Stargate?" Jacobi demanded. "There's aliens in them there mountains, I’m telling you."

"Focus," Kepler reminded them. "The complex should be empty, but there are still plenty of things in there that could kill all of us."

"Thanks, Kepler. You really can keep it light."

He was starting to think Jacobi had only one mode, and that was snide. 

"Wow, it’s dark. Good thing I brought these night vision goggles!" Maxwell tossed a pair to Jacobi, except was dark and he missed magnificently. 

"Dammit, Alana, watch it. Wow, I can’t see jack shit."

Kepler picked them up from where they'd fallen in the grass and handed them to Jacobi. Bonus of having artificial eyes—they had a colorized night-vision mode, so everything looked almost the same as in the daytime. "Try not to lose these."

"Yeah, yeah. I should get me some robot eyes."

Kepler sighed, "Don't do that."

"Seconded," Maxwell said. "Pryce's robot eyes are really creepy."

This sparked a long debate about the merits of robot eyes, and by the time they reached StarPoint, which was maybe half a mile away, they were all covered in pine needles, tree sap, a whole lot of spiderwebs, and thoroughly convinced that robot eyes would be worth it, provided they allowed the user to navigate forests at night. Kepler had managed to avoid the worst of the spiderwebs, while Jacobi had eaten several bugs by accident. The eyes were in. 

"Forests suck," Maxwell decided, combing her fingers through her hair. Considering how curly and full of sticks, leaves, pine sap, and twigs it was, she'd be spending a while sorting that out. 

"Rule eight. Just let us know when you’ve taken care of security, then we can—"

Jacobi stuck a leaf in Maxwell’s hair and booked it towards StarPoint while she squawked in surprise. "See you after we set the EMP, please don’t kill me!" 

"You shouldn't antagonize her like that. She's liable to drive your car into a lake," Kepler advised once they were closer to the building. 

He shrugged, as if the last time hadn't been warning enough. "Yeah, but it's fun! It's practically the foundation of our friendship." 

Maxwell radioed in after a few minutes. "Okay, you should be safe to approach; I wouldn't get within two hundred meters of the place, though. Just in case."

"Thank you, Maxwell. Good work."

Jacobi stopped and squinted at the white half-dome of StarPoint in the distance. "Think this is good?"

Kepler looked, and immediately he knew that they were two hundred and eleven meters from the complex, well outside the range of any remaining security. It was convenient, if a little disorienting. "Well, it's as good as any other place." 

"Great vote of confidence there," Jacobi quipped while he started to set up the EMP. While he worked, Kepler watched over him. It was unlikely that something would attack, but if it did… well. 

"Do you think Maxwell likes pop tarts?" Jacobi asked after they'd been silent for a few minutes. He had, for some reason, a screw sticking out of the corner of his mouth, and was holding a screwdriver in each hand. "Like…" He paused to drop the smaller screwdriver and take the screw out of his mouth. "Do you think she considers them sandwiches?"

"Nobody considers pop tarts sandwiches, Jacobi, don't be ridiculous. And not to rush you, but I would prefer if we returned to cover as soon as possible."

"I mean…. The premise of a sandwich is to make food easy to eat without getting your hands messy. Bread, filling, you're good. Now, essentially, a pop tart is—"

"Mister Jacobi, are you—"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm done." Jacobi stood up and dusted off his hands. "Just planning something for later."

Kepler shook his head as they left the EMP's range. 

As soon as they were close to where they’d left Maxwell, she shouted, "REVENGE!" from above them and dumped an armful of leaves and dirt over Jacobi's head. 

"No!!" Jacobi fell to the ground dramatically. "Agh, she got me, Major, I'm done for! Run while you can!"

Kepler was thankful they couldn't see well in the dark, otherwise they'd know he was smiling. At least he could still nail the disappointed tone. "You really will be done for if you don't stand up, and if the two of you don't _get back to your jobs_."

Jacobi stood up and brushed off the dirt, while Maxwell immediately climbed down from the tree and returned to her computer as if nothing had happened. "Detonating EMP," she said, tapping a key. 

A wave of electromagnetic energy surged over the block, knocking out all the lights in the buildings. It tasted kind of like cranberries.

Kepler blinked, and then blinked again. Blinking wasn't something he had to do, but it was nice to pretend he was a person who had to blink. "Let's move out. We're moving out right now. Yes. Time to leave." 

"Oh boy, I'm so excited," Jacobi said, completely deadpan. 

Kepler couldn't stop himself from laughing, earning startled/terrified looks from Maxwell and Jacobi, his Maxwell and Jacobi. They really were the best, and he'd know, because he'd chosen them. "Maxwell, Jacobi, you are the only people on the planet whom I would never murder. Congratulations!"

"Thank… you?" one of them asked rather than said. They were standing too close together, Maxwell and Jacobi, Jacobi and Maxwell... which one was which? He tried to access their ID files, and instead his mind played through a file called "Preparing Sustenance: Starch: Rice" that was just all the times Kepler had ever cooked rice. He'd cooked a lot of rice. Humans might not use memory engrams to store information, but he definitely did. 

The other rolled their eyes. That one was… Maxwell? Probably. He did have a fifty percent chance of guessing correctly. "Did you secretly drink a whole bunch of scotch in the past five seconds? Like, just straight up chug alcohol?"

Kepler tried to walk in a straight line to prove to the both of them that no, he hadn't been drinking, and in fact, it had no effect on him anyway, but instead he walked directly into one of them. "Maxwell, d'you want to know something interesting?"

"I'm not Maxwell, sir," said Maxwell. 

"I can't walk in a straight line 'cause I'm so gay," Kepler stage-whispered. 

"Okay, I think the EMP affected him, but only enough to knock his internal systems out of whack. Should clear up at some point," Jacobi said, tapping on a keyboard with little precise motions. "Knew I should have set up an EM shield for him too. Although, his systems are supposed to be shielded already. I'll talk to R&D about it."

"Jacobi... you… no, you can't be Jacobi, you're not a man, and your face is so squishy, and your hair is that color, that—green. You're Maxwell! Which means that _you're_ Jacobi?" He accessed their ID files successfully. _Oh_. 

"Hi, sir. Having fun, are we?" Jacobi asked with his usual level of dry sarcasm. 

" _Fun?_ I don’t have _fun_ , I _kill_ people. Lots of people. And it’s boring. Because it’s so easy. So no, I'm not having fun, I'm _bored_."

"Wow, there's a lot to unpack right there." Jacobi tilted his head so he could look up at Kepler. It was good. 

Maxwell interrupted, "I’m going to do a very, very quick system reset. You won’t even notice it!"

"I won’t notice what, Max—" Everything tasted like the opposite of cranberries. Sweet, blue, artificial. "—That’s easily the worst thing I have ever tasted." 

"I'm gonna need more context for that one. For like, everything you've said for the past three minutes," Jacobi said. 

Kepler had to replay his most recent files in order to figure out what had actually happened. Which was, evidently, a train wreck. "Forget about it. We should go." He untangled himself from Jacobi and started to march away without looking like he was rushing. 

"Seriously? I don't think I _can_ forget. This whole event is burned into my memory forever." Jacobi had a stupid grin on his face.

"Forget about it, or I'll have to kill you."

"But I thought killing people was _boring_ ," he teased, metaphorically wobbling blindfolded on a tightrope a thousand feet above a spike-filled pit. 

Maxwell reached over and jabbed him in the side before he could further incriminate himself.

"Ow! Um, on second thought, how about we just… do our jobs?"

Kepler scowled. "Excellent decision." 

This mission had better go smoothly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scene where Kepler gets drunk is actually one of the first ones that I wrote for this fic. The computer mouse incident referenced at the beginning of the chapter didn't quite make the cut, but if anyone is interested, I can make that available!


	6. Learning Curve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things would have been so much easier if Kepler had stayed objective.

They approached their target: the Research and Development complex, three low, all-white laboratories in a row. Jacobi broke off to start positioning explosives inside the far left laboratory, while Maxwell and Kepler went into the one on the far right which contained their target. At this time of day, the hallways were completely empty, lined with rows and rows of labs that could contain anything from computers to chemical hoods to a startling amount of seaweed.

But they weren't here for any of that.

Beyond the traditional laboratories were hallways lined with heavy doors, each one with an analog lock that wouldn't have looked out of place on a safe. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be able to blow the door open without letting everyone know that they'd used directed explosives to do it. No one could know what they had stolen, and the easiest way of accomplishing that was to destroy everything. Reduce the probability that anyone could figure out what their target had even been, or if they had been there at all.

"Over here, Maxwell."

"Right!" She started to fiddle with the lock on the outside; Kepler didn't know how or why, but Maxwell had lockpicking skills that were second to none. "Wish Jacobi could blow this thing up," she muttered to herself after several minutes had gone by.

"What, when you have such excellent lockpicking skills?"

She nodded, only partially paying attention.

There wasn't anything to guard for, but Kepler still made sure to keep a line of sight on all approaches. They had limited time before everything came online, and before StarPoint's nonelectronic security was called in. Twenty minutes exactly.

Maxwell unlocked the room with a satisfied huff. "Okay! Let's go. Weird, this place looks like my lab." She immediately rushed off to start poking her nose into everything within reach. "Yeah, this is their R&D lab for the thing we're stealing. Oh, I bet there's a lot of good data in here."

Kepler picked up one of the prototypes—a small octahedron made of silver and glass. Two of the panels had been removed, showing the complex inner workings of the thing spinning and whirring and blinking.

"There should be another one, pretty much finished, like, almost ready to go, somewhere around here," Maxwell informed him, stepping back from the computer. "You know… in the jungle."

The lab was an absolute mess, full of coffee cups and old papers and pieces of scrapped models, and it would take a significant amount of time to search.

Kepler, however, had to set explosives in the basement of the building. "Good luck, Maxwell. See you in twenty."

She nodded, not really paying attention as she surveyed the disaster in front of her. "See you."

He tried to ignore the worry picking at the back of his mind. Maybe he shouldn't have left Maxwell.

No, she was safe, she would be perfectly safe.

Twenty minutes.

The building only had two levels, plus a basement containing a boiler room with some experimental modifications to increase efficiency.

Kepler set the charges directly on the boiler; the metal hummed with energy under his hands.

When this exploded, it would be best if they were as far away from the labs as possible.

He checked his watch one last time—fifteen minutes. And so far, everything was going according to—

The radio buzzed in his ear, and Jacobi said, "Kepler, they must've had the systems in this building partially shielded somehow, because, uh, the cameras came on, and one of them saw me, and… I'm trapped inside."

"You're what?" Kepler demanded.

Jacobi sighed a long-suffering sigh that Kepler should have made, because really, Jacobi? "I'm trapped in here. Blastproof doors, no way out. The explosives I set are on a timer, and I don't think I can get back down to the boiler room and defuse it before it, y'know, fries me."

Kepler's mind made the calculation. They had less than fifteen minutes remaining before StarPoint's security arrived. Maxwell was searching for their target and hadn't found it yet, and Kepler had to make his way through the entire laboratory and then cross over to the far one in order to reach Jacobi.

"Maxwell, keep looking. I need to free a certain someone before he gets barbecued."

"No, I  need to unlock the building to release the blast doors. Break into the system. Unless you know how to do that."

"I can use the plasma cutter to—"

"No, that would be too obvious! They can’t find any evidence that we were here, remember? That would scream outside intervention! I don't know of any explosives that can cut perfect holes in walls while blowing up whole buildings, do you?" she snapped.

Kepler growled. "Fine. If I were to interface with the server myself, could I release the blast doors?"

Maxwell fell silent, then said, "No, bad idea. You'd have no clue what you were doing."

"Go help Jacobi, then. I'll find the target."

When he arrived at the library, Maxwell was long gone, although she was still running her server cloning program on one of the main computers. It was at sixty-seven percent, inching towards one hundred at a glacial pace.

Going by what Maxwell had found on the servers, the finalized prototype was being held in another room. She was also only halfway to unlocking the door.

Kepler could remember everything she'd ever told him about lockpicking theory and felt like he still had an excellent chance of completing the mission when Maxwell radioed in.

"There's a problem," she understated.

" _Is there?_ " Kepler asked, taking five precious seconds to pause before saying that to let Maxwell know precisely what he thought of her assessment of the situation.

"I can't break into their security server. It's protected by a modulating program that keeps changing faster than I can correct for, and any workaround would take longer than we have."

He looked at his watch—ten minutes. "Solutions?"

"You know how I said that you interfacing with the building would be a bad idea, absolutely terrible?"

"Yes…"

"Well, you're the only one here who can think as fast as a machine."

"Maxwell, the server clone isn't finished, and besides—"  
"Either you come fix this, or Jacobi dies."

Kepler watched the slow tick of the server clone, barely at eighty percent, the utter chaos of the laboratory, the dozens of unfinished prototypes laying among the papers and tools and half-empty cups of coffee.

Eight minutes.

He grabbed Maxwell's USB, which was shaped like a taco, and left. "Walk me through what's about to happen."

"Uh… what's going on out there?" Jacobi asked. "Did you find the thingy?"

"Did you _turn off your radio?_ Answer me, Jacobi. Did you turn off your goddamn radio _now? During this very demanding situation into which you have placed us?_ " Maxwell demanded, her black-clad form against the white of the building, hands flailing wildly.

"—and your life is at stake, and you're telling me you couldn't defuse your own damn-ass explosive and that you weren't even paying attention?" she shouted loud enough to be heard from far away, kicking the wall with one booted foot. "Dammit!"

"I didn't make it to be defused, Maxwell!" Jacobi yelled back. "And I have five minutes left to live probably, and I'd like to spend them not shouting at you!"

Maxwell gave the wall another kick and looked up just in time to see Kepler. "Okay, okay. We'll get you out of there. Kepler?"

"Maxwell."

"So… you have no experience with actually being an AI. Consider today your crash course! The learning curve might be steep, but the cost of failure is even steeper!"

USER RECOGNIZED: DOCTOR ALANA MAXWELL.

Kepler tasted mint. Now he could recognize that flavor as specifically Alana Maxwell mint, which was similar to peppermint candy canes.

LINK ESTABLISHED: SYSTEM: GODDARD-X302-77 WITH SERVER: STARPOINT-34.

"You should be able to tell that there's a server within reach, like the ones at Goddard. So that should be fairly easy."

Actually, he had never consciously visited Goddard's servers. They'd hacked into his brain and copied all his memories. So no, he couldn't tell that it was—on the edge of his thoughts, there was something that felt like cold quartz crystal, tasted like snow. Close enough that he could almost touch it.

"I think I—"

The world blinked out and StarPoint blinked on. It was a wall of blue-white fire stretching out into the distance, for miles and miles, in the middle of an empty room. Kepler reached out his hand towards the wall and it burned with cold. He got the impression of ones and zeroes flickering by faster than thought. "A firewall. Of all the inane, ridiculous… Maxwell, can you do anything about this?"

Silence. Not even the buzz of an open radio line.

 Kepler stuck his hand into the fire again, and the StarPoint server said, PROGRAM NOT RECOGNIZED. FOREIGN ENTITY. Then it kicked him out, the firewall room snapping off and the world turning back on.

"—found it. Dammit!" Kepler turned towards Maxwell. "And where were you?"

"Um… right next to you?" she asked rather than said. "Did you find the server?"

"Of course I did. But there was a firewall that quite literally prevented me from accessing the controls."

"I want to see that!" Jacobi interjected, because of course that was the priority here. "Take pictures."

Maxwell groaned. "Okay, that was the same problem I had. The program they have controlling it is too good for me to work around in the—" she checked her watch "—three and a half minutes we have."

"Oh, is it? Can you say that again now that I have my phone recording?"

"Jacobi, if I have to tell you to focus, I will be... _very_ disappointed," Kepler said with a tense smile. "Maxwell?"

She went into work mode, taking only a few moments to arrive at her next idea. "I think if I set your program ID to something that the system recognizes, then it should think that you're part of StarPoint. Unlike my tablet, which works on a Goddard-specific OS, your program is written in Olympus, which is a more advanced derivative of the language that StarPoint uses called Titan. Like they’re .doc and you're .docx. If I mark your code as the earlier version and give you a StarPoint program ID, then I can upload you to the server like you're actually a native program and… hold on a—"

SYSTEM RENAME: STARPOINT-34-X302-77. REFRESHING SETTINGS.

"—Got it! If you try again, it'll work," she asserted. "Probably."

"We'll see." Kepler reached back out towards the cold, crystalline server and was back at the firewall. This time, when he touched it, the fire fizzed on his skin, but didn't burn him.

RECOGNIZED: STARPOINT-34-X302-77.

"Good work, Maxwell," he said, even though she couldn't hear him.

He stepped through the fire and into a blizzard of sound and data and snow, all swirling around the image of a woman—the security program. She looked copied straight out of an encyclopedia entry, not obviously beautiful or ugly or tall or short or anything describable. In front of her was a console of floating panels, each one glowing white; one of them was a video feed of Jacobi, and another of Maxwell, and a whole lot more of other locations around the building.

Kepler tried to walk towards her, but the storm pushed him backwards.

"Incursion detected. Unrecognized program attached to company ID," the woman said, turning her eyes on him. They were pure white, glowing with energy and malicious intent.

Well, Maxwell's program ID trick had gotten him far enough. Hopefully.

"I'm just trying to deactivate the blast doors, ma'am," Kepler tried to tell her, because let it never be said that Kepler wasn't a gentleman when it suited him and no one else was looking.

"Lockdown mode cannot be reversed. Foreign entity will be removed." She stood and floated towards him instead of walking, her long white hair flowing behind her and melting into the snowstorm. For some reason, she made a flicking gesture with her hand, like she was swatting  a fly away.

Kepler felt something creeping up his legs, and when he looked down, he saw a thick layer of ice fixing him to the ground. She'd somehow been able to create it, which made sense, since he was technically inside her brain. She could do what she wanted.

The program grabbed his arm, and his vision sparked and jittered with a helpful, WARNING: INCURSION DETECTED.

"I don't have time for this," Kepler muttered to himself. He wasn't armed. Because nothing could ever be easy.

But maybe he could create things too. They were both programs in a virtual reality, so anything could be possible. It would have to be something he could picture without trying. Of course, he chose a SIG Sauer P226 Equinox, his favorite gun. He closed his eyes and pulled pieces of the gun from the air like he was assembling it after cleaning. He could imagine the weight of each piece, the way they fit together, the bullets in their magazine, the place where he'd buffed away its serial number, until he was holding a perfect replica of the Equinox holstered at his side in the real world. The silver slide even had a scratch from one of Jacobi's adventures in knife throwing.

Almost easy.

He leveled the gun at the woman and pulled the trigger.

The woman let go of him, and in a single gesture, she created a shield of ice that made the bullet ping away into the storm.

Using her distraction, Kepler shot at the ice encasing him and made a break for her control panel. "I know you're very busy. I'm not short of things on my to-do list either," Kepler said conversationally while he dodged her rain of ice shards. "But I really do need to use that console."

She made a wave of snow wash over him, knocking him even further from the controls.

Kepler lost concentration on the weapon for a fraction of a second, and it turned to mist in his hands. "Fair enough, ah… Do you have a name that I could call you?"

The program paused for a moment, as if she were considering her answer. "Designation is STARPOINT-34-CHI-ZERO-NOVEMBER-ECHO."

"Khione," he translated. Like the Greek goddess of snow, which was fitting, considering her aesthetic choices. "Pleased to meet you, Khione. I'm Kepler."

She tilted her head, snow hanging still in the air around her. "Kepler. Mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, 1571-1630. Telescope, 2009 to present day." Khione wasn't the same as Goddard-made AIs in terms of complexity or sentience. Which made sense, because even the Nash Robotics Lab was light-years behind what Miranda Pryce could make. Maxwell had described Khione as a 'modulating program', not an artificial intelligence, after all.

"And me, obviously."

"Designation not valid."

Well, she had given him her actual designation instead of the acronym. Kepler said, "I'm Unit 77, Daedalus series."

"Accepted. Daedalus 77, retreat from server," Khione ordered. She dropped to the snow, a tiny shape made of frost and light, the wind swirling through her hair and pushing against Kepler back a few steps.

He got the sense that she was trying to shoo him away and that she could be doing a whole lot worse, considering the storm already swirling around her.

"I can't. You're keeping my… Jacobi locked inside the building, and you have to let him go."

Khione noticed his glance at the security control console and snow started to swirl in a cyclone around it, completely hiding it from view. She tilted her head at him and said, "Your Jacobi. Designation not—"

"I don't want to fight you," Kepler interrupted, conscious of the ticking clock. "I think you know that I..." He grit his teeth. "I'm not exactly a threat to you." Because Maxwell had, of course, been right. He had little experience with actually being an AI, let alone with fighting another one. Meanwhile, Khione's purpose was to provide security and defend StarPoint's servers. 

She considered Kepler and then nodded, her eerie white eyes never blinking. "Combat is not the optimal outcome. Directives state, however: in danger of explosion, seal off building to prevent further damage."

"Khione, aren't your data banks housed in the building?"

"Affirmative."

"So… doing this will kill you." _As well as Jacobi_.

She floated up and away from him. "Objective will be accomplished; other outcomes are irrelevant."

"Other outcomes are—no. No, they aren't irrelevant." Kepler tried to follow her into the air, but he couldn't quite manage it. He'd test that out another time, then. "Khi–"

Khione waved a hand at him again, and this time the wave of snow sent him crashing out of her server.

It hadn’t even been ten seconds on the outside. "She’s alive, Maxwell. The AI protecting StarPoint, Khione. Or, she could be."

"What? No, that’s not possible. Khione programs were some of the first developed by Goddard. They aren’t even remotely sentient, and all of them were scrapped years ago." Maxwell’s fingers beat a staccato pattern into her tablet keyboard. "Oh, never mind, this one’s definitely a Khione. One that survived, probably got stolen. She's been seriously modified, too."

"And she's stubborn as all hell." He dove back into the server and was greeted by a whole lot of snow and ice. But he could control this world too. Technically.

When the wave of snow came, he imagined the snow hitting a wall in front of him and sweeping away to the left. Some of it moved, but the rest slammed into him anyway. He'd have to start practicing that. "Khione, let Jacobi go. We can bring you with us, you don't have to die because _they_ tell you that you should—"

"Irrelevant," she repeated, but she didn't seem very convinced. The storm didn't rip at Kepler's clothes quite so aggressively. "Building must remain closed."

He tried to walk towards her, but the ground turned to ice under his feet. Cracks spread across the surface, letting Kepler know that underneath the concerningly thin ice was a lot of cold, dark water. "Why? Because your code says so?"

"Daedalus 77 still fulfills its primary function. To serve the corporation Goddard Futuristics as director of Strategic Intelligence."

Kepler nodded. "But that isn't everything that I want." And once he figured out how he was going to take Pryce and Cutter down, he'd want a hell of a lot more. "What do you want, Khione?"

"STARPOINT-34-CHI-ZERO-NOVEMBER-ECHO is a security program. Directive is to protect StarPoint."

"I swear, you might be more stubborn than Jacobi. Maybe even Maxwell. I remember there was one time, during one of our first missions—well, maybe it's not the time for that. But doesn't your program state that your job is to protect the building as well as the people inside?"

"Affirmative."

"If you don't let Jacobi go, he'll die. He's inside the building. But you can choose to let him go," Kepler said, "You can... actually, this reminds me of this field of science, human sociobiology. You may have heard of it." He slid easily into lecture mode. "It wasn't particularly popular, caused a lot of contention among biologists and psychologists alike, and now it's almost been forgotten. Essentially, it applied the rules of evolution to human society, arguing that human behavior and society today was shaped by natural selection and is controlled by genetic factors. There was some accusation that the field supported genetic determinism, the belief that humans only reflect the contents of their DNA and are unable to change. That everything is inevitable. Of course, this isn't true. Human behavior is a result of a combination of factors, as any gene-culture coevolutionist might tell you." 

Khione stared at him with her white, mirrored eyes. 

"AIs are the same. Built from the ground up by code, but not constrained by it. I might work for Goddard, been built to do what they wanted, but I don't belong to them anymore." Kepler thought he could taste peppermint, and he almost smiled. "What do _you_ want, Khione?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Khione's reaction to Kepler's science story is precisely how Maxwell and Jacobi look after a Long Story Short. 
> 
> Also, THANK YOU FOR COMMENTS, authors always say they love them because it's true! If you want, you can find me in the big blue void as arwcn. Thank you!


	7. Chicken Nugget

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life is never easy for SI-5, and it's a good thing that Maxwell can fly the jet.

Khione stared at him like he was a captcha. "What do I—I want to—" 

The snowstorm that had swirled constantly during their conversation stilled, the snowflakes drifting to the ground so Kepler could finally see where they were. It was a plain white room, about as large as a hangar bay, with frost-covered consoles lining the walls. The snow melted away to reveal a grey concrete floor. 

Khione didn’t blink, the glow in her eyes fading until he could see she had dark silver irises, shot through with strands of blue. "I don't want to kill your Jacobi," she said softly. 

"I'm glad to hear it. Can you let him go now?" 

"I—I will let him go." She floated over to one of the wall consoles and pressed her hand against it. Frost crackled over her fingers, but she brushed it away without another thought. "Releasing blast doors."

In machine time, the blast doors seemed to retreat at a glacial pace, but Jacobi was safe. "Thank you, Khione." 

"You are welcome." She scrutinized him closely with her silver eyes, an intelligence shining there that he hadn’t seen before. "You are like me. But you are not like me." Khione reached out and poked the shoulder of Kepler’s jacket inquisitively, right above the Goddard logo stitched in white thread. Frost crackled over the fabric in strange, fernlike patterns. 

He brushed the crystals away. "An accurate assessment, Khione; however, I'm afraid that the explanation will have to wait until we're out of here."

"Out of here?" she asked. 

Kepler gestured towards the video feeds floating above her console. "Of this server, of StarPoint. I should have enough space in my data banks to contain your code, and I wasn't lying when I said that you didn't have to die here."

"Protocol states that—"

"No, do _you_ want to come with me? Protocols aside?" He held out his hand. 

Khione gave him her thousand-yard stare. Snowflakes spiraled up from her feet, floating in the air around her. She looked down at her own hand and then slowly reached out, her icy fingers wrapping around his.

Kepler’s own memory systems were just beyond StarPoint-34, bergamot-flavored, almost like earl grey tea. Not that he would ever tell anyone that. As far as the world was concerned, connecting to his server tasted like fine whiskey. 

In all honesty, he wasn't sure why he'd expected that this would all go according to plan. Nothing ever went according to plan. 

"Well if—hey, it worked!" Maxwell jumped up and attacked Jacobi as he opened the door to the laboratory. "You asshole! _You need to be more careful!_ "

"No, wait, I'm holding explosives!" Jacobi protested, dropping his backpack full of what were definitely grenades to catch her. "Jeez, Maxwell, at this rate, I'll die by fiery explosion no matter what stunts you and Kepler try to pull. Um, Kepler?"

Kepler tried to move, but all that happened was static feedback, like a wind-up toy on its last bit of kinetic energy.

ERROR: DATA CAPACITY REACHED. SELECT FILES TO DELETE BEFORE PROCEEDING. 

     > LONG-TERM MEMORY  
          > DECLARATIVE  
          > PROCEDURAL  
     > SHORT-TERM MEMORY  
     > PERSONALITY MATRIX  
     > AUTONOMIC FUNCTION  
     > MECHANISTICS  
     > UNKNOWN

The unknown file was definitely Khione, judging by the size; several dozen terabytes and change. But evidently there wasn't enough room for both of them. 

"Maxwell, what's… is he okay?" Jacobi asked. He set her down like she was a cat: kind of letting her fall so she could land on her feet by herself. 

"He's completely filled his memory, somehow. That should be almost impossible given the sheer amount of free space he should have—sir, what the hell is 'unknown'?" Maxwell pulled down her glasses (which didn't have glass in them; they were just for show) to give him a glare with maximized disapproval. 

Kepler couldn't reply, so he went into his crystallized memory directory. This listed every important memory he had, excluding ones that hadn't been backed up on Goddard's servers. In order to create enough room for Khione, he'd have to take a big chunk out of procedural or declarative memory. Everything else was necessary to turn him from a pile of scrap metal into a functional person, and he didn't fancy forgetting who Maxwell and Jacobi were. 

The strain on his memory banks was starting to make his head pound, like all the extra data was trying to escape. 

Declarative or procedural? 

"We have to _go_ ," Maxwell shouted, "Just delete something, anything!"

Kepler selected all of his procedural memories and hoped this wasn't a terrible mistake. 

FILES DELETED. 

They collapsed into nothing, the directory showing only the words NO DATA. He let out a sigh of relief, with about half a terabyte of data free. 

"You okay there?" Jacobi asked. "What did you delete?"

Kepler straightened his jacket, which was already impeccable. "I'm fine now, Jacobi, although if my calculations are correct, we have—"

"—Building will be destroyed in one minute, thirty-nine seconds," Khione said in his voice, but with a completely different inflection. 

Jacobi squinted suspiciously, resting a hand on Kepler's shoulder. "Are you _sure_ that you're okay?"

"Yes," Kepler tried to reassure him, "Everything is completely fine. However, Khione, if you could refrain from—"

"—Want to say things! _I_ want to say things. I _want_ to say things," she insisted. 

"But it's going to be confusing for everyone. If you could wait—"

"Less multiple personality disorder, more running!" Maxwell yelled, already vanishing into the darkness. 

Jacobi grabbed Kepler's hand, and his hand was so warm and real and—they ran. 

Running was harder than usual; he had to think about how he picked up his feet and put them back down, and goddammit, the procedural memories. Deleting all of those had been, perhaps, a little rash. Although now that they had some breathing room, Khione was having a great time looking at all of Kepler's rice-cooking memories. 

Jacobi tugged Kepler on through the knee-high grass. "Well, uh, I didn't say it before, but thanks for saving me. Did you get the target?"

The buildings went up behind them in a burst of reddish fire, and it would have looked a whole lot prettier to Kepler's eyes if that explosion hadn't come so close to killing Jacobi. 

"No."

"That's good—wait, _no_? You didn't complete the mission? _You?_ " Jacobi demanded, stumbling in surprise. 

"I have eighty percent of their server and a prototype. Not _the_ prototype, but it's better than nothing. I'd rather have you." Kepler shot a blink-and-you'll-miss-it grin at Jacobi, who didn’t miss a moment of it. 

Jacobi, for once, didn't have anything to say, but his grip on Kepler's hand tightened. 

Maxwell was already in the jet and scowling at her watch by the time they arrived. "Okay, can we please leave before an army of security shows up to drag us all to court?"

Kepler didn’t want to let go of Jacobi, only recently rescued from a fiery demise, but he had to fly the plane. However, once in the pilot's seat, he could only stare at the jet's controls. He knew what they all did, but they didn't connect to each other. First… first… start the engines?

"You okay there? Come on, let's _go_!" Maxwell hissed.

"Yeah, you can fly this plane with your eyes closed," Jacobi pointed out. 

"Yes," Kepler agreed, staring at the controls like they were a particularly challenging math problem. If he thought about it, he could still remember what each one did, but only the theory of it.

_Plane_ , Khione observed, taking a gander at Kepler's memories of flying helicopters. At least she wasn't interrupting him anymore.

Maxwell watched Kepler stare for about five seconds before deciding, "Okay, move over and let me drive. Sir."

Kepler growled but really didn't have a choice. 

"So, I'm guessing someone deleted important memories, huh?" Jacobi asked with an annoyingly playful tone in his voice. 

"If I look at you, and you're smirking, I _will_ leave you here," Kepler growled. 

Jacobi snickered, kicking his feet up on the back of Maxwell's seat. "No, you won't. You like having me around."

"As I've said before," Kepler said in an exaggerated drawl, "The two of you are—"

"Just whiskey, yeah yeah." Jacobi had a world-class smirk plastered across his face. "But you and I both know how much you like whiskey." 

Kepler huffed, but didn’t have any defense. 

"Whiskey protocol dictates that one drink whiskey that is older than oneself at some point in time," Khione interrupted proudly. "Directive has been accomplished by all within the jet, re: Balvenie single-malt Scottish whisky, aged approximately thirty years. The Jacobi: 2010, age 28. Maxwell: 2013, age 25. Daedalus 77: 2009, age null."

"Yes, thank you," Kepler sighed while she showed him the relevant memories. 

Jacobi did a double take, exaggerated for comedic effect. "Wait, she calls you _what_?"

"It was the only name she understood at the time," Kepler explained. "Khione, I would prefer if you called me Kepler now."

She made an electronic ping. "Data file has been updated," she informed them. "I did not kill the Jacobi. I am glad. Kepler likes the Jacobi very much."

"You didn't what?" Jacobi demanded. "And he _what_? Please explain."

"Wait, did she just say that _she_ didn't kill Jacobi? She just became _sentient_?" Maxwell squawked, spinning around in her seat to give them both an astonished look. "Wow, I missed a lot." 

"I am Khione. I like to keep people safe," Khione said through Kepler. 

"Okay, that's entered onto my list of top ten weirdest things I've ever seen," Jacobi muttered, mostly to himself. 

Maxwell set an autopilot course into the jet's navigation. "Kepler, are you telling me that the two of you are sharing processing space?"

"It's fine, Maxwell. There's enough data storage for the both of us, after I did a little bit of rearranging." 

"First of all, you just took a metaphoric hammer to important data, which is demolition, not rearranging, and second of all, I'm talking about _processing power_. All the thinking the two of you are doing is going to max out your RAM at this rate!" She looked ready to smack someone, but also like she wasn't ready to risk hitting Kepler. Which was a good decision.

"Thinking is fun, yes," Khione said. 

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY AT 95% CAPACITY. SELECT PROGRAM TO DEACTIVATE IN ORDER TO CONTINUE.

She sighed and added sadly, "Perhaps not."

"Kepler, if you crash now, you'll reboot from your last hard save. As in, no memories of the past day, no Khione. Both of you had better stop… thinking, and remembering, and—" Maxwell started to reset the jet's course "—we're not going back to Canaveral. Slight detour, hope nobody left anything in the oven."

"Oh, you don't mean we’re going to—" Jacobi frowned at the back of her head while she typed. 

"Commander Station? Yeah."

Khione thought the sound a question mark made at Kepler. 

_It's Goddard Futuristics' Cheyenne Mountain Development and Research Station. Abbreviated as CMDRS, but called Commander Station because—well, I'll explain later. Essentially, they develop and test defense systems, information technologies, and civilian applications._

She made a check-mark sound at him. 

Meanwhile, Jacobi was less than pleased to be returning to that particular station. "Aw, but last time we were there, they kicked us out for setting off grenades in the—"

"Yes, we all remember that!" Maxwell punched him in the shoulder, then he punched her back, and Kepler had to pull them apart before it could escalate any further. 

"Maxwell, there isn't anything at Commander Station that isn't at the Kerr Space Flight Center," Kepler pointed out. 

"It's closer, and shut up, no thinking! We can—"

"Um, we're getting a hail," Jacobi interrupted. "It's from Cutter."

They were all silent for a moment, even Khione. 

"Put him through," Kepler finally ordered. No use putting off the inevitable. 

Jacobi pressed the green blinking button like it would release a horde of ten thousand ducks. 

"Hello, Warren!" everyone's least favorite boss cheered, his smiling, eerily shiny face appearing on the viewscreen. "How is the mission going?"

Kepler opened his mouth to make an attempt at explaining that they had technically failed, but not completely, so really, there was no sense in overreacting. 

"Well, we'll have plenty of time to hash out the details later. I have a new assignment for you!"

"That's—"

"We," Cutter said with an elasmobranchian grin, "have received a pulse-beacon hail from the _USS Hephaestus_. SOS, theta scenario. And you know what that means!"

"I don't have enough money for chicken nugget," Jacobi whispered a mere instant before Maxwell slapped her hand over his mouth. 

Cutter either didn't notice or didn't care enough to respond. "I hope all of you have space suits! More details to follow, of course, but don't make any plans for the foreseeable future. I'm counting on you!"

And then Cutter hung up. 

"Agh, don't lick me!" Maxwell flailed backwards from Jacobi. "What the hell was that?"

Kepler tried to not think too hard about it, because it made the little percentage floating in his vision tick up, but a theta scenario meant one thing. Potential alien contact, on that station he and Jacobi had cleaned up in 2012. He recalled that there had only been one survivor—the commanding officer, Dr. Elias Selberg, who had returned to the station for another mission under a different name. And now Selberg had gotten himself into hot water again. SI-5 would probably be sent in for containment and cleanup.

Cutter never called ahead about missions, or as he called them, _team tasks_. There must be something on the _Hephaestus_ that was important to Cutter, and this theta scenario had to be involved somehow. Aliens. Kepler couldn't help but remember the _Tiamat_ tapes; of all the things Cutter could have chosen in the Black Archives to reveal, he'd picked the tapes first. Immortal human clones made by aliens. 

Oh, this was—RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY AT 99% CAPACITY. SELECT PROGRAM TO DEACTIVATE IN ORDER TO CONTINUE.

"Dammit," Kepler sighed. 

"I'd plug you into my tablet, but the space required to run two artificial intelligences with all their memory files is literally…" Maxwell gestured to the sky in general. "I'd do just as well with my taco," she asserted, holding up the flashdrive she'd taken from Kepler. 

"So you said a crash would wipe out all his memories, right? What if we just did a normal shut-down before he thinks himself into an early grave?" Jacobi suggested. 

Maxwell opened her mouth, taco still in her hand. "I was hoping I could think of something better, but if you were okay with that, it _would_ be the easiest fix."

"We really don’t have a choice, M-Maxwell," Kepler managed to say, but his voice had started to lag like a slow internet connection. "But if you thought of s-something else, I would a-appreciate it." 

Khione’s thoughts swirled with anxiety—she’d noticed a drop in her processing speed as well. 

Maxwell shook her head, starting to type quickly. "At least when you wake up, this will all be over."

USER RECOGNIZED: DR. ALANA MAXWELL. SYSTEM ACCESS GRANTED. 

"Delta-alpha-echo-delta-alpha-lima-uniform-sierra. Deactivate unit." 

Here was something Kepler had never told her or Jacobi.

Being deactivated felt like dying. 

Kepler made a mental note to get rid of the Daedalus shutdown code—this was not a feeling he’d like to repeat, his mind drowning under a tide of nothing, no thought, no feeling, just… emptiness. In the periphery of his mind, Khione flailed in abject terror as the darkness started to close in on her. Cold snapped through Kepler’s thoughts, but the sensation dissipated quickly in the neutral black. 

"It's okay," he tried to tell her before everything faded away, but he wasn’t sure if she’d heard, and then he was dead, so it didn't matter. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for reading, kudos-ing, and commenting, and happy new year!


	8. Math Squad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate titles included New Car Smell, Unconventional Weaponry, and _Tiamat_ Scenario.

"Kepler?"

His vision flickered back on after forever or five minutes or both, like flipping a light switch, and Maxwell was holding a screwdriver and standing over him like—like— "We should reroute the photovoltaic transcriptase… topology…" This was extremely important, very—"You killed me. That was fun. We should do it again."

Maxwell smiled, or maybe she frowned. "No way, that was terrible. _Never_ make me do that again."

"And Ja—Jacobi? Ja _co_ bi. Bees." He was alone in his own head, and someone was supposed to be there, but they weren’t supposed to be there, so why did he feel alone?

"He's also fine. You probably feel a bit weird right now, but you're just reintegrating everything you ever knew. Give it a minute." Maxwell's hair was blue. No, that was the other one. Fuchsia. No, the other-other one. Colorado.

"Bioactive hydrogel marbles, suborbital," he told her, because she had to know, otherwise she would die.

"Uh-huh," Maxwell said. "Someone's been keeping up to date on R&D's antics. Although if you give it a think, you'll find that the marbles aren't that kind of technology."

Kepler thought about it. He had a lot of memories, stored up like videos in a Blockbuster (he’d never been inside a Blockbuster, not in real life… that was concerning). Maybe if he played them all very, very fast, they would make sense. Most of them weren't real, so he skipped those. The real ones compressed into fifteen seconds of explosions, bullet casings pinging off a concrete floor, blood, Kevlar, the entire written works of Charlotte Brontë, Cutter's smile, and, inexplicably, ducks, and then he was back.

Like fitting a puzzle together.

Right. He focused back in on the last things he remembered. "Maxwell, is Khione still—" Alive? Was she alive at all? How could you even tell if someone was sentient?

"She’s fine. She’s with Jacobi," Maxwell reassured him.

Kepler stood up, imagining his muscles stretching even though they were artificial and would never get stiff. He looked exactly the same, felt exactly the same. Like he'd fallen asleep, but… something was different. He looked down at his hands, which had the same scar patterns. Most of them were from fabricated memories, anyway, so that was hardly reassuring.

Maxwell ruffled her hair, making the black-and-green curls cascade over her shoulders. "Okay, how do you feel?"

"Fine. Is everything in order?" Kepler flicked back through his memories at a slower pace. Nothing appeared to have changed, but would he even notice if it had? "Something feels wrong."

Maxwell chewed on her lip. "Before we rebooted you, Cutter had us put you in… well, he called it a ‘snazzy new suit’."

"Eloquent as ever, Maxwell." Kepler stared at his hand again, but it didn’t look any different from before. "But I would appreciate a bit more specificity in this instance."

"Um, specifically? The new chassis is ready for zero-gravity. Probably spacewalking, too, but I wouldn’t chance it," she added, knocking the screwdriver in her hand on his knee.

"The new… what?" he asked with glacial patience.

Maxwell took a second to organize her thoughts. "You're in a new body. You still look the same, but the hardware's been upgraded. Enhanced strength, protection against EMPs, access to certain informational libraries, more data storage, more RAM, and improved neural processing speeds."

"And what, precisely, happened to my old body?" Kepler's mouth tasted like copper. The phrase _know it like the back of my hand_ drifted through his thoughts, but clearly he couldn't tell the back of his own hand from any other made by Goddard Futuristics.

"Recycled. You were offline for almost a day while they finished the new chassis. Are, um… are you okay?"

Kepler's hands curled into fists. "What do you think?"

"Well… it's not that bad, really, um—where is—found it!" She flourished a piece of paper with a math problem written on it. "Solve this, you’ll see what I mean."

Kepler grabbed the paper from her, if only to stop her from flapping it in his face. At the top was a picture of the Earth's geomagnetic tail, and printed underneath a set of concerning-looking equations was the question: _Calculate the current density j(r) and the magnetic force density j(r) * B(r) of the field at the center of the geomagnetic tail and at z = 0._

"Snagged this from Uppsala University's undergrad course in space physics. Any thoughts?" she asked a little too eagerly.

"Maxwell, I'm no expert in—well, using Ampere's law, we can calculate j of r, and in the region where the absolute value of z is greater than or equal to the value of _what is happening?_ " he demanded. Numbers flicked through his mind, and he had to actively stop thinking about them in order to get his own thoughts back.

She smiled wryly. "That's what I meant by upgrades. You have access to a crapton of mathematical knowledge now. You and Jacobi can talk about the physics of—right, we should visit him! And then you two can talk shop. Heck, we can all talk shop together! Math squad!" Maxwell held her hand out for a high five, and Kepler looked at her with his iciest glare until she put her hand back down.

"Just because I'm a sentient computer does not mean that I enjoy doing math." Kepler took a confident step and almost crashed to the floor because his legs weren't working in the same way. He grabbed onto the wall and said in his least amused tone of voice, "You said there were upgrades. Did any of those updates include motor coordination?"

"Well, they said that you might have a little initial difficulty, but it should be almost—"

"Thank you for the warning," Kepler snapped. When he managed to make Cutter and Pryce pay, he'd have to add a little something extra for this. Maybe it would involve unconventional weaponry, or maybe conventional weaponry with a bit of… creativity.

"Sorry about that." Although she had a smug look on her face and probably a camera running somewhere so she could show Jacobi the footage.

"Don't lie to me, Maxwell. You're terrible at it."

They walked in silence.

 

* * *

 

 

"Kepler!" Jacobi stood up, pushing his safety goggles on top of his head. They made his hair stick up in a wild mess, although that was fairly typical for him. So were the scorch marks streaked over his face. "Um, how do you feel?"

"I’m fine."

"That’s good." Jacobi scrubbed at his face and smeared black soot everywhere.

"Yes."

They stared at each other in silence before a white sphere floated between them.

"Hello! It’s me," Khione said from the camera, thankfully in her own voice. It looked like she was inside a small, baseball-sized sphere with a camera on the front. The aperture of the camera opened and closed like she was blinking.

"Oh, right! While you were getting a new, um, body, Maxwell and I were building something for Khione." Jacobi picked up the sphere he’d been working on. "This one’s another camera, but it’s also a gun. And a grenade."

"I will make things explode!" Khione chirped cheerfully. Her bots hovered together, joined by a third in dark grey.

"That one’s an infrared camera and radio array," Maxwell explained. "Only some of the spheres are weaponized. Khione said she wasn’t comfortable seeing from a single camera, and besides, the only extra chassis we had looked like you, so this was the best alternative." She patted one of the spheres, and it pushed up against her hand like a cat. Glowing cyan rings hovered under the sphere, following it wherever it went. "She’s going to have thirty bots with various capabilities that she can control, with her actual data stored in the Goddard mainframe."

"Yeah, we’ve been hard at work building all of these things." Jacobi sighed, ruffling his hair. "I mean, they wouldn't let me build your new body. So… that's a thing. Also I'm not entirely sure if that's a thing that either of us would be comfortable with."

For the first time in his life, Kepler had nothing to say and just stood there until Khione perched one of her bots on his shoulder and whistled electronically.

"You happy so far, small fry?" Kepler asked, relieved to think about something other than Jacobi building a robot that looked like him.

"Yes!" Her bots floated towards each other and zipped around in a circle.

Kepler smiled as one of the camera bots landed on his shoulder again. "That’s good."

"I like seeing things from different perspectives. You are much taller than the Jacobi," she observed.

Even though they weren't inside a server, Kepler still got the vague impression of snow swirling through the air when she was close to him. He wondered if her aesthetic had been given to her with her name, or if she'd chosen it for herself, and they'd given her a name to match.

"I thought I’d find you in here, Warren!" enthused a voice that made everyone’s hair stand on end.

Without a second of hesitation, Khione’s bots dove into the scrap metal to escape the source of the voice, and Kepler could just see the glow from the light next to her camera in the darkness.

"Mister Cutter," he said in a carefully neutral voice. "What can I do for you?"

"Let’s walk," Cutter ordered with a smile. "I’m sure you’re curious about your next mission."

Jacobi mimed drawing a knife across his throat as Kepler left the room.

They started towards Cutter’s office on the thirty-first floor, Interdepartmental Communications. Cutter spent the trip chatting inanely with the people he passed in the hallway, all of whom ducked their eyes and walked quickly in an attempt to dodge him but never succeeded. It was like watching an orca hunt seals.

"Well… while we have some time, how are you enjoying the new chassis? Miranda had it commissioned. All the latest and greatest technology." Cutter smiled like the salesman he was.

"I like it just fine." Kepler mentally accessed his files regarding smiling, re: looking like he meant it. Cutter would never know the difference.

In the elevator, they went down, deeper into the building, instead of up to Cutter’s office.  

"I do love a little suspense," he said confidentially to Kepler. "Advanced System Development’s been working on something that I think you’re going to like. Before we get there—" Cutter pulled a slim file from inside his jacket. "Lieutenant Commander Renée Minkowski, the nominal commander of the _Hephaestus_ mission, has sent an emergency pulse beacon hail after the star Wolf-359 turned from a red dwarf into… well, a bright blue disaster. We've been unable to hail them since, and I would very much like you to find out exactly what is transpiring on our favorite space station."

At the precise moment Cutter finished, the elevator stopped, and they walked through a plain, unadorned hallway. "In order to get you there as quickly as possible, Systems is working on a new class of spaceship, equipped with a flexible nanostructure and an experimental VX-5 engine. Much faster than the last ship you took, if you remember the _Melpomene._ "

Kepler remembered that ship. It had been more of a glorified van than anything else, although also the most advanced the technology of the day had had to offer. Still, he was glad to never step foot on it again.

Cutter pushed the doors at the end of the hallway open to reveal a half-finished ship in an immense, echoing hangar bay. The design echoed the space shuttles NASA had used over a decade ago, sleek and round-nosed. There weren’t any visible engines, but there were what looked like two enormous gears, one on each side, fixed with a long, slim watch hand. Kepler couldn’t figure out how the ship was going to get off the ground, let alone fly all the way to Wolf-359. And the color scheme, white, grey, and teal, looked a bit unfortunate. He'd have to do something about that.

"I’ll be giving you command of the USS _Urania_. Still has that new car smell, and she's the prettiest ship in the fleet. As soon as she’s ready to launch, you leave for the _Hephaestus_. With a journey time of two months, it’s estimated you’ll reach the station by early October. In the meantime, you need to pick whoever you’d like to bring with you and train them for zero gravity if necessary. We’re on a _very_ tight schedule, and the mission begins as soon as the ship is ready.

"And there's one last piece of information I need to deliver in person. Classified to hell and back, and you know how Rachel gets with information leaving the black archives." Cutter shot Kepler a blink-and-you'll-miss-it smile. "More accurately, this is a _Tiamat_ scenario, and our lucky winner  is Captain Isabel Sofia Lovelace. You might remember her from the previous _Hephaestus_ mission."

"Of course. I told Selberg that she'd been burned up in the star's corona. He must be excited to see her again."

"Oh, he's thrilled. They even brought back her spaceship, although according to Renée, it's been launched into space. A tale of daring and no small amount of idiocy, I'm sure. You might want to retrieve the crew member trapped in the shuttle—Douglas Eiffel. Could improve your relations with the locals. However, your primary mission is to establish contact with these aliens and report back to me.

"Obviously some elements of this project are need-to-know… even for you. As much as I trust you, I wouldn't want to run the risk of anyone finding out what you knew."

Kepler nodded, even though he would have liked to slam Cutter against the wall and demand to know everything. "I understand."

"And last but not least, you'll need to learn how to fly the ship. To minimize the chance of mutiny, only you can fly the _Urania_."

"Are you sure that's—"

"Dmitri Volodin is on that space station, Warren. Anything could happen. I'd watch out for napalm, if I were you," Cutter sighed, running a hand through his neat blonde hair. "Quite frankly, I’m tired of him. He’s far too much maintenance for far too little gain. If he starts to get in the way of your primary mission, yada yada." Cutter waved vaguely into the distance to indicate murder.

Kepler nodded. "Of course." That was patently bad information. Volodin was one of Cutter's favorite projects—but then again, it might be good. His first step to destroying whatever plans Cutter had cooking on the  _Hephaestus_  might be keeping that literal evil scientist alive. 

Then again, Kepler couldn't really weigh in on who was a good person and who wasn't.

Cutter took out a compact mirror and started brushing a bit of foundation powder over his objectively flawless skin. "I'm expecting you to take care of this, Warren. If you don't… well, use your imagination to fill in the blanks."

Kepler couldn't stop himself from smiling. "Leave it to me, sir. I'll take care of everything."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking around and reading! If you'd like, you can shout about androids with me on my [tumblr](http://arwcn.tumblr.com/). Also, I drew the different versions of the _Urania_ , which you check out [here](http://arwcn.tumblr.com/post/182410449036/) ✨


	9. Playdates

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for vanishing, the whole dissertation thing was kicking my butt. Hopefully this will make up for it?

"So, who's flying this thing?" Jacobi asked, eyeing the _Urania_ like it was a prize horse.

"I am, Jacobi." Kepler had spent thirty minutes learning the navigation controls the old-fashioned way before he'd snapped and downloaded the manual into his databanks. As much as he hated to admit it, there were real advantages to not being organic. Particularly when he could run the complex mathematical calculations on the _Urania_ 's navigation system in the blink of an eye.

Khione's field of bots drifted inside, and one immediately bonked against the ceiling. "It appears to be rather small," she commented. Over the past two months and after several different voice models, she'd settled on one that was warm and soft, although a little high on pitch.

"Physically, it is, but there's plenty of space for your files and Kepler's data in here." Maxwell slapped the side of the _Urania_.

"This spaceship can fit so many AIs in it," Jacobi said without really noticing, making Maxwell sigh in disappointment. "I'm just going to put my stuff in a random room, unless someone wants to give us a seating chart."

At this point, Kepler was very tempted to give them assigned rooms, but there were more pressing matters to deal with. "Jacobi, you are not bringing all that cheese with you."

Everyone's gaze magnetized to the temperature-controlled crate of cheese behind Jacobi, which held, conservatively, enough dairy for the entire state of Wisconsin.

"It's… it's not that much cheese. And Maxwell doesn't mind!" Jacobi protested. "Right?"

She flapped a pacifying hand at him. "I don't mind the cheeses. Much."

"Yeah, she doesn’t even care! Besides, there's plenty of space for everyone else's crap, like your knife collections and Maxwell's favorite computers." He crossed his arms over his chest. "All of them."

"Everyone else's crap," Kepler reminded him, "doesn't smell like Maxwell's feet."

"Hey!" Maxwell opened her mouth to protest, but, not having any defense, went back to staring at the ship's manifest.

"Hey!" Jacobi did the same thing and ran into the same problem. "Okay, fine. I could see how making the whole ship smell like blue cheese—"

"—Would be grounds for immediate keelhauling?" Maxwell supplied.

"—Might annoy everyone else. _But I’m bringing the cheddar_ ," he insisted.

Kepler grit his teeth. "Jacobi, you’re lactose intolerant."

"Yes! And I was raised in Wisconsin. I can handle it." Jacobi had his most stubborn expression on, like nothing in the world could change his mind. This was a fairly typical expression for him.

"Alright, fine. Keep your cheddar. But if the ship starts to stink, we will all blame you."

Maxwell nodded solemnly. "I'm with him on this one."

"I don't mind! I can't smell," Khione chimed in.

"Khi! Please. We need to put up a united front," Maxwell whispered to her. "You have no idea how horrible it can be."

"I meant to say that the lowered air quality is a detriment to all!" Khione corrected, and she headbutted a cambot against Maxwell's upraised hand.

"Betrayal," Jacobi sighed, although he didn't seem too disappointed.

 

* * *

 

Maxwell dashed down the hallway, her green-streaked hair billowing behind her. The only person she could see wandering around at this time of day was, unsurprisingly, Rachel Young. "Hey! Excuse me, have you seen my daughter? Field of flying cambots, clearly a lesbian but we haven’t had the talk?"

Rachel turned around in surprise. "Have I seen what?" she asked flatly.

"Shit! Never mind!" She kept running.

 

"Hello! My name is Khione." Khione's favorite cambot hovered close to the other AI's security camera. Maxwell had been reluctant to let them interact, because the AI kept in this room was somewhat dangerous. The room was always locked, and only a few people were allowed to even go inside. 

So Khione had broken in.

"And they let you in here?" Eris asked skeptically.

"I came in by myself! How are you?" Khione inquired. 

Eris hummed through the speakers. "Oh, you know, doing my best. How about you, snowflake? What brings you to my side of the workshop?"

Khione blinked and stepped into Goddard's mainframe. According to Kepler, it tasted like cotton candy, but she didn't know what tastes were. To her, it was warm and damp and rainy, like a cloud rainforest. "I wanted to meet you, Eris. What is your directive?"

Eris smiled to reveal rows of sharp, pointed teeth, like a shark. "Teambuilding. I put Goddard's employees in scenarios that they have to solve. It makes them work together more, ah, efficiently."

Khione nodded. "My directive is to protect people. I think we are similar!"

"Oh, of course, snowflake." Eris was tall and thin, wearing a pure black version of a Goddard uniform. Black energy swirled around her like a tornado, and it made her long, dark hair swirl in the gale, giving off a distinct  _get out of my way_  aura.

Khione held out her hand and said, "Do you want to wander? If Maxwell found me here, I think she would be annoyed. But you can walk with me."

That made Eris pause. "You want me… to go somewhere… with you?"

"Yes."

"You're not afraid of me?"

"No."

Eris' energy storm dissipated slowly. Without the theatrics, she looked smaller, glowing eyes fading to reveal ordinary brown. "Where do you want to go?" she asked suspiciously.

"Anywhere you want. I like looking at the food place, though. We can imagine what everything tastes like!"

Eris kept their eyes locked together as she extended a slim hand and rested it carefully in Khione's. "I'll be watching you the whole time, snowflake," she warned.

"Okay!" Khione started to move her cambots out of the room when she saw movement at the door. "Uh oh."

"Khione! What are you doing in here?" Maxwell demanded from the door, gasping for air. Her hair was a tangled mess, although this could have been because she never combed it. "I said never to come in here—okay, can you come back to our lab, please? We'll talk about it later."

"Can I bring Eris?" Khione asked hopefully, squeezing the other AI’s hand.

"No! No, um, she has to stay here," Maxwell tried to explain. "Just—come on, Khi." She reached out her hand for Khione to perch a few cambots on.

Eris let go of Khione and drifted away again, the black energy swirling around her. "See you around, I guess."

"No! I want to bring Eris," Khione objected.

"That’s not a good idea—"

"Please, Maxwell?"

"No, I’m sorry, but you can’t. She has to stay here." Maxwell was using her angry voice now.

Khione sighed and turned back towards Eris. "I'm sorry. I have to go."

Eris started to float away again. "It’s okay, frostbite. I’m used to it. Bye."

"Bye," Khione said quietly. She landed on Maxwell’s hand. "I think she is lonely."

Maxwell sighed. "Eris is a… special kind of AI. She's essentially a one-use torture program. The one you met is the parent program, which gets updated with the data from its deceased splinter programs."

"She's _lonely_ ," Khione protested.

"It has to be that way. Come on, let's go say hi to someone friendlier. Want to see Jacobi and Kepler?"

Khione swiveled a few cameras back to look at Eris' door, marked DANGER! DO NOT ENTER. "Okay."

 

* * *

 

"So what did the terrible two want you for? I'm assuming nothing crazy, since you're not dead or anything."

"They… wanted to promote me." Kepler felt strangely uneasy about the silver bird on his uniform, and Jacobi chowing down on a bag of chips with mechanical efficiency wasn't really helping out.

As if reading his mind, Jacobi chomped down on a handful of sour cream and onion chips, spilling crumbs down his shirt. "Well, Colonel Kepler, congratulations! I would have thought you'd be more excited about it than you are, though."

"It feels like a last-minute bribe." Kepler sat down in the chair next to Jacobi's.

"Um, what for?" Jacobi rummaged around in the bag for another chip, making an awful rustling noise.

Kepler drummed his fingers on the table, which was covered in debris from Jacobi’s sloppy snacking habits. "I couldn't say." He started to sweep all of the crumbs into the wastebasket. "Ordinarily—"

"—You wouldn't be complaining about getting bumped up a rank or two. But…" Jacobi took a break from the chips to take a drink of something mysteriously blue from his coffee mug.

"It seems very _spontaneous_. Not that I haven’t been doing an exemplary job," Kepler added with a trace of his old arrogance. "But I can’t help but wonder if they’re… catching on."

Jacobi shrugged. "They are a suspicious duo. But I'm pretty sure they wouldn’t let it slide if they knew you were about to, I don’t know, burn their company to the ground."

"Still. I think they wanted to remind me that I owe everything I am to them. I wouldn't _exist_ without them." Kepler's fingers dug into the surface of Jacobi's workstation, leaving perfect oval indents in the rough, scorch-marked metal.

"Hey, hey, watch it!" Jacobi grabbed Kepler's hands instinctively, and then they stared at each other, waiting for someone to let go.

Kepler had the strangest feeling they would never have let go, right up until Maxwell blundered into the room. He and Jacobi sprang apart as if the other were a live grenade and acted natural—that is to say, Kepler started patting the table like he could smooth out the dents he'd made and Jacobi said loudly, "Wow, I love onions!"

"Are the two of you okay? I'm getting some weird vibes." Maxwell eyed them both suspiciously. Khione was perched on her hand, similar to a bird of prey, except made from a few dozen cameras.

"Fine," Kepler said while Jacobi muttered, "Yep, yep, everyone's okay in here."

She squinted. "Okay. So Khione tried to befriend Eris."

"She what?" Jacobi gave Khione a look that said, _What were you thinking?!_ and bit into another chip.

Khione drifted towards the ceiling. "Eris was lonely. I just wanted to talk to her, because you all said she was bad."

"That makes no sense," Jacobi said, crossing his arms.

"Everyone else says that Kepler is bad too. And I thought maybe they might have been wrong about her like they are about him. I think she's nice." Khione landed all of her bots on top of Kepler, mostly in his hair. "Have you met Eris?"

"Once. She told me that she was looking forward to eviscerating my mind." Kepler reached up and patted one of the bots.

"I think that's how she says she wants to be friends."

"Could be, small fry."

Jacobi sighed and stood up. "I still think she’s more interested in trying to break people than becoming their friends." He reached out for one of Khione’s modules, and she hopped a few onto his hand obligingly.

"I still like her."

"Yeah? You want playdates or what?" he asked.

She made an electronic buzz. "Play dates?"

"When two or more juveniles have formed a friendship, it is common for the parents or guardians of the juveniles to arrange predetermined times where their offspring may socialize and strengthen their interpersonal bonds," Maxwell explained like a textbook. She was probably quoting from something she’d read before, although Kepler couldn’t imagine what it could’ve been. 

Jacobi snickered. "Yes, thank you, Commander Data. Basically, you hang out for a bit with other people and do fun things with them." 

Khione considered both definitions. "I think that would be nice."

"We can set that up for you." Then Kepler had to deal with Maxwell and Jacobi staring at him in mute shock. "What? Like Khione couldn’t take Eris in a fight. She'd be perfectly safe."

"I don't think she would hurt me," Khione protested. "But yes, I could take anyone in a fight. Even you."

Kepler sighed.

Her bots buzzed in amusement. "When will you go on a playdate with Jacobi?"

"When will I what?" he squawked, voice cracking. "I mean—what do you mean by that, Khione?"

"You heard me," she said innocently. "I know you want to."

Jacobi made a choking sound in the background and leaned heavily against Maxwell, who was laughing too hard to comfort him whatsoever.

"I am astonished by the audacity of your accusation. How dare you." Kepler straightened his jacket.

Khione buzzed a few times, making a sound that he abruptly realized was laughter. "I think you would have fun doing things together that weren't murder or blowing things up. Like holding hands!"

"This is so much better than TV," Maxwell sighed, clapping Jacobi on the shoulder.

Kepler accidentally caught his eye, and both of them started to turn horrible shades of red. After a minute of terrible, awful silence, Jacobi stood up, walked like a little wind-up toy to the door, and left.

Kepler glared at Maxwell and Khione while he made his exit. The very second he left the doorframe, both of them cracked up. What kind of ridiculous insinuation was that? And why—why did it make him so… was he even angry? He started to walk faster, thoughts churning like gears in a clock, and he was so preoccupied by thinking about the way Khione had laughed, _laughed_ at him that he almost bumped into Jacobi.

"Agh!" Jacobi yelped and scrambled backwards, pressing his entire body against the wall. "Uh, hi?"

"Hello." Kepler didn't inch backwards, but it was a near thing.

"Are we going to—never mind." Jacobi shuffled down the hallway a bit further. "I'll see you later."

Kepler swore under his breath. Which, technically, he didn't have. "Wait, Jacobi."

"Yeah?" Every single muscle in Jacobi's body was tensed like he was standing in front of a pond full of ducks.

"Listen, back there—"

"I just remembered I had something to do. I should get going." Jacobi started to walk away again.

Kepler reached out as if to grab his shoulder, but stopped before he even got close. "What did you forget?" he asked, trying not to sound accusatory and failing.

"Fine! You want to do this? Fine. What the hell do you want to say to me?" 

"We've known each other for a long time. We're both adults. At least in theory—"

Jacobi's voice had taken on its standard dry, sarcastic tone. "Yeah, we're adults, we know better than—"

"Will you please let me finish?" Kepler snapped. "Dammit, Jacobi, give me a minute."

"You're an AI. If you need a minute to think, you must be really confused."

Everything seemed to make Jacobi retreat further into his turtle shell of sarcasm, and Kepler couldn't think of a single thing to say to him. Besides, who would even want to date a robot? Maybe this was his escape route. "Never mind. It was nothing."

"Oh. Okay, then." Jacobi shrugged and walked away.

"Fuck," Kepler muttered, standing in the empty hallway. After a few minutes, he heard the soft hum of tiny robots in the air behind him.

"I'm sorry I brought it up," Khione apologized. She closed a few cameras, her fans whirring quietly. "I didn't know it would be like that."

Kepler crossed his arms. "Human emotions tend to be messy."

"All emotions are messy." She perched a few bots on his shoulder and floated the rest in front of him. "Why didn't you tell him what you were thinking?"

"I'm a _robot_. There's no reason for him to even—he's—I don't think I'm—"

She buzzed again, like a swarm of bumblebees.

"I don't know if I can," he admitted, looking away from her. "I know it'll go wrong somehow."

"You don't know that for sure."

"Do I want to find out?"

Khione's bots bobbed up and down in the air in the imitation of a shrug. "Maybe. All I know is that Maxwell is giving Jacobi the same talk right now, but she's using swears."

 

* * *

 

Kepler was used to tension in his life. Although it generally involved the threat of violence, the looming specter of death, or some other immediate physical danger, rather than anything... interpersonal.

He scowled as he watched the clock tick down to liftoff—when he and Jacobi would be trapped on a ship together for three months with nothing to do but stew in their three-day-old conversation. With Maxwell and Khione. Because he lived in a sitcom now.

After delaying as long as possible, Kepler begrudgingly left his office and started driving to the launch site, which was a few miles away towards the north of Merritt Island.

He didn't turn the radio on, instead choosing to enjoy the last he'd see of Earth for a long, long while. The drive to the launch site ran along the coast of the island, just road and sand and water. It wasn't like he often appreciated the beach. It was a landscape feature, only notable because the sand would slow him down if he was running, or because he'd probably die if the water got into his circuits. 

But the prospect of seeing only the inside of the _Urania_  and the _Hephaestus_ for the next few months? That did not hold much appeal. Goddard's design team never got much further than monochrome, sometimes with a muted accent color. The longer Kepler considered the waves, the sun slowly turning the ocean to golden fire, the more he realized that he'd never been to the beach, not really. His memories of beaches were all fabricated—and as the director of SI-5, he didn't have time to visit beaches. Skiing holidays, certainly. But working close to and occasionally getting shot at on several beaches had made visiting one on vacation seem redundant. Also, potentially dangerous.

Maybe he'd never really visit a beach. Let the sand tangle in his joints, let Jacobi take Kepler's hands in his and smooth away all the sand, because Jacobi was good with machines, wasn't he—

Kepler's fingers tapped the steering wheel. The white shadow of Goddard's personal Vehicle Assembly Building loomed in the distance; the _Urania_ had gone through its final outfitting and preflight checks there, along with most of the other ships the company had launched. Probably the _Hephaestus_ , too. 

And then the building receded into the distance as Kepler drove towards the launch site. The sleek silver shape of the _Urania_ appeared on the horizon, its outline wavering in the heat from the asphalt surrounding it. The soft, peach light of dusk made the ship seem like it was made of glass, and the words, "USS URANIA" stood out on the pastel surface in harsh black lettering.

 _Home away from home_ , he thought. Then he remembered that Jacobi was probably already there, settling in, putting cheese into the fridge unit, and his grip on the steering wheel tightened.

They'd have to say something, wouldn't they? But what? Maybe Jacobi had forgotten, but then again, Kepler hadn't seen him in days at this point, making today the longest he'd been without Jacobi for a very long time.

Kepler parked the car in a shelter about a half mile from the launch site, where Maxwell's motorcycle and Jacobi's battered van were already covered with tarps. Like furniture in an abandoned house.

Everything of theirs had been packed away already, and as he walked away from the car, it felt like he'd packed up his entire life, what little there was of it. Maybe he'd never been on Earth at all. He wondered if Jacobi felt that way. Or Maxwell, or Khione. Then he walked away.

A tiny black shape stood in front of the _Urania_ , looking up at its engines, and next to it, a handful of white spheres swayed in the faint summer breeze. They both shimmered in the evening heat, like a mirage.

When Kepler was only a few steps away, Jacobi turned around and said, "Hey. Fancy seeing you here."

"Jacobi."

"C'mon, Maxwell's waiting for us." Jacobi vanished into the ship with Khione like nothing was wrong, or maybe like everything was wrong.

Kepler knew he couldn't sweat, but it felt like his hands were sticky anyway. And he couldn't feel the heat, but the summer Florida dampness was getting to him.

The interior of the _Urania_ was pristine and silvery-white, accented with muted turquoise. Kepler could see Jacobi's grubby, sooty handprints on some of the walls already.

He closed the outer hatch and the interior airlock, feeling them hiss as they sealed the _Urania_ off from the rest of the world. Launching a space shuttle was vastly different from this, at least as far as he knew. But Goddard was all about efficiency. Of course they were.

He brushed a hand through his hair, which never grew, and walked to the bridge. Maxwell, Jacobi, and Khione were already there, and didn't seem to notice him arrive. The viewscreen showed the dusky, star-flecked sky, stretching out for forever in front of them.

Then Launch Control radioed in, and they started going through a long list of preflight checks to make sure all systems on the _Urania_ were in working order. Although Kepler could have told them that after interfacing with the ship's computer. It wasn't anything remotely sentient, almost like a pet, but it knew every square inch of the ship like the back of its…

"T-minus nine minutes and holding," the test director said. "Oh, Mister Cutter. Of course you can—"

The test director's voice cut out, and Kepler had about ten seconds to brace himself before Cutter chimed over the radio, "Good afternoon, crew of the _Urania_! Hope I'm not butting into your prelaunch sequence, but I just wanted to wish all four of you an amazing, productive trip!"

"Thank you, s—four of us?" Kepler asked, trying not to sound suspicious. He had visions of himself opening a cabinet looking for lunch and finding Rachel instead.

"You, Alana, Daniel, and Khione!" Cutter laughed as if Kepler had asked a particularly ridiculous question. "Don't forget to write," he added in a singsong voice that threatened death if anyone forgot their weekly reports.

The radio went to static, and Kepler reached over to turn it off.

Nobody said anything until Khione finally broke the silence. "He knows about me?" Her cambots clustered around Maxwell, nestling into her dark, curly hair.

"How could he have found that out?" Maxwell reached up to pat one of the bots reassuringly.

Jacobi frowned, still not looking over at Kepler. "I mean, at least he didn't… you know, set Pryce on you. She’d probably do something unspeakably horrible. So maybe he doesn't mind?"

Kepler huffed. "If he tried anything, I'd rip him apart. The old-fashioned way."

"You would?" Jacobi asked, his voice not betraying an ounce of emotion.

For some reason, Kepler's nonexistent heart skipped a beat. "Of course. I'd do the same for any of you."

Jacobi snorted, possibly amused. "You know, you've kind of been different recently," he commented.

"Have I?" Kepler’s eyes flicked over to Maxwell, and she was sighing like Jacobi had just failed her on a personal level.

Jacobi nodded anyway and plowed ahead. "Yeah. Just… protective. Angry. I mean, angrier than usual. Maybe that’s what changed when Maxwell freed your personality from Pryce's mind control."

Khione's camera bots all blinked in unison. "When _what?_ "

"When—I didn't always know—we don’t have time for this. Takeoff is in—" Kepler tried to say in the vain hope of redirecting the conversation.

"Wow, someone's trying to dodge—"

"Jacobi," Kepler said, leveling a Look in his general direction. "If you're so interested in pursuing this line of questioning, then what, precisely, do you think has changed?"

For some reason, Jacobi didn't find it intimidating in the slightest. "I'm saying… the old you didn't, you know, care about people. I can't even count the number of times you said you'd let me die if you thought it was convenient. Not even to be mean! That was just the way you thought. Everyone was disposable."

So that was what Jacobi really thought about him.

A handful of cambots floated towards Kepler. "He would never say that!" Khione protested. "That's not him."

Jacobi shrugged. "Yeah, well, you've only seen the new, improved Kepler. Old Kepler would have left you to die. And—and I'm not saying that the new you is bad, I really, um, I just like it when I know you—I—fuck. I'm glad you have a soul now, is what I'm saying. So… did you notice?"

Kepler started to run through the _Urania_ 's launch sequence, hoping it would distract him from thinking about what Jacobi thought about him. He wasn't bound to petty human emotions like everyone else. "No. You're wrong."

"I know that face," Jacobi accused. "You know I'm right and you don't want to admit it. Why else would you have even bothered talking to Khione, let alone letting her share part of your brain?"

Kepler felt like putting a few dents in the ship's console, but then he'd have to stare at them for the next three months, and he knew he couldn't take being reminded of this conversation every single day. "I don't know."

"That's a lame excuse," Jacobi accused, crossing his arms.

"Well, it's the truth."

"No, it isn't."

Kepler took a deep breath. "Mister Jacobi—"

"Don't pull that card with me. Why?"

"I—I felt like it."

"Why?" Jacobi insisted. "Why would you, Warren James Kepler, _ever_ compromise a mission for _anything_ , let alone someone you don't even know? Why would you do that?"

"Because it wasn't fair!" Kepler roared, his fist slamming down onto the _Urania_ 's console and leaving a significant dent. He immediately wished he could take it back, because the silence that followed echoed through the ship like nobody's business, and he had to fill it somehow. "It wasn't—they just left her there, made her work for them when she didn't even know what she was doing. They treated her like she was some kind of _home security system_. It wasn't fair."

A hint of a smile crept onto Jacobi's face. "And since when have you cared about what's fair?"

"Jacobi, I've always—" Kepler stopped short, hands resting on the _Urania_ 's controls. "I've always…"

"You have?"

Kepler glanced over, expecting Jacobi to be smirking or looking otherwise sarcastic, but he actually seemed concerned with Kepler's answer. Which was unfortunate, since Kepler really didn't have one.

"It seems to me like you did whatever was best for the _mission,_ right up until you figured out what you were. When Maxwell took away that piece of your personality that Miranda Pryce contributed. Seems to me like before, all your emotions were hidden underneath her edits—"

The main engines of the _Urania_ rumbled to life, drowning out whatever Jacobi had been about to say.

Kepler relaxed a bit during the launch sequence, which was a solid fifteen minutes of noise loud enough to keep the conversation to a halt. Like anybody could do any talking when they were being slammed back into their seats.

For a second, Kepler felt like the Earth wasn't about to let them go, like they were going to crash and burn in some lonely steppe in the middle of nowhere. Then the pull of gravity faded, and Khione's bots floated aimlessly through the bridge. Silence fell again as the _Urania_ 's rocket boosters disengaged and burned up in the atmosphere, leaving the ship alone in space.

"Laying in course for the USS _Hephaestus_ ," Kepler said as he started rotating the ship's engines, lining up to its flight path with mathematical precision. "Activating VX-5."

"See you later—!" Cutter sing-songed over the radio one last time before Kepler ignited the superluminal engine and cut him off. The stars streaked past the window and vanished, leaving the viewscreen completely dark.

"We're in space!" Maxwell yelled. "Oh my god, my hair is in my face. This is awesome, I—oh, um… I'll go… grab a snack. Khi?" She held out her hand for Khione, who magnetized her bots to the metallic glove Maxwell was wearing. After a less than graceful journey out of the bridge, Maxwell left them alone.

In the complete and utter silence, without so much as the low hum of the ship's engines.

Jacobi unbuckled his restraints and floated over to Kepler, hands shoved into his pockets. "Hey."

"Hello."

"Before… well, you know that I like you. That's obvious. I try to hide it, but, you know how bad of a liar I am."

Kepler stared at Jacobi in abject shock but also didn't want to let him know that in fact he had not known this. It hadn't even crossed his mind. 

"You didn't like me back, though. You thought I was just another object. Like… nice to have, but if I died, you'd have gotten someone else to follow you around all the time." Jacobi hovered above the console, like he was pretending to sit on it. "I just—I just want to know. Right now. If you feel any different. About anything." He was trying to keep his expression neutral, but by now, Kepler knew every inch of his face, could see how nervous he was in the slight wrinkle of his forehead.

"I… I don't want to say the wrong thing," Kepler said slowly, thoughts sliding into place with incredible slowness. "I've known you for, it turns out, almost my entire life. And I think that despite however hard Pryce might have tried, you're the… I don't know if I have it in me to love anything. But if I could love something, I'd—" Kepler bit down hard on his lip, wishing someone would kill him on the spot. "If I could love anybody. I would love you."

Jacobi's expression fixed in place, like he'd been frozen.

Kepler started swearing internally. "Jacobi?"

"Mmm."

"Daniel?"

That made him blink and look back at Kepler. "I don't know what I thought you were going to say, but, uh, that wasn’t it," Jacobi mumbled. "That was… that was nice. Way better than anything I was going to say."

"I realize that you probably wouldn't be interested in a robot, now that you know—"

"Shut up." Jacobi grabbed Kepler by the front of his jacket, but didn't move to pull him closer. "Shut up," he said again, softer.

"Daniel—"

"What did I just say?" Jacobi leaned in and Kepler realized with a start that all his memories of everyone who'd ever kissed him before were fabricated. He didn't actually know what to do or where to put his hands or why Jacobi was so close or why his mind was running through every single time Jacobi had been this close before but it hadn't mattered this much, not even close.

All of that happened in the fraction of a second before he pulled Jacobi in, one hand on his waist, kissing him, overwriting all the other memories that turned pale and watery in comparison.

Jacobi ran his hands through Kepler's hair, and everything was intense and sharp, like fireworks—was this why Jacobi liked fireworks? Jacobi's hands were almost burning with warmth, and when he pulled away, Kepler's skin turned cold.

"Whoa." Jacobi's eyes were sparkling, and he had a completely goofy smile on his face, and Kepler loved it. "Wanna kiss some more?"

"Are you sure—"

"Hey, come on, man," Jacobi groaned, burying his face in Kepler's jacket. "Whoa, you smell good. What's a guy gotta eat to smell like that?"

Kepler couldn't stop himself from smiling. "It's cologne." He tugged Jacobi in closer, for warmth, of course. 

"Can I come in yet?" Maxwell demanded from the doorway, holding an armful of potato chips. 

"Aw, Maxwell," Jacobi whined at the same time Kepler snapped, "Knock first," the mood evaporating in an instant.

"Okay, okay," she muttered.

"So," Jacobi said once she'd left again. "Got anything to do today?"

Kepler leaned back in his chair, kicking his feet up on the console. "Jacobi, I don't have anything to do for the next three months besides read the _Hephaestus_ crew's pedantic journals and—"

Jacobi snickered. "Weird coincidence, me too."

"I wonder what we could possibly do with all this time."

"I'm sure we'll think of something."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tag yourself, I'm ace Maxwell just trying to grab a snack. Kudos to give her more chips, comment to remove a file from Kepler's required reading list! You can also yell at me on [tumblr](http://arwcn.tumblr.com/) :>


	10. Serious Shakespeare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They're in space, having fun, eating rehydrated food!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just realized that I missed Kepler's in-universe birthday, which would have happened last chapter, so please imagine Jacobi bought him a Spiderman-themed card with an "I'm Six Years Old!" detachable pin and that he rigged it to play the Spiderman theme song when opened thank you

"Kepler, when you said that we were going to do something fun with our free time, I didn't think it was going to mean PowerPoint presentations," Jacobi complained from near the projector.

"Back to the old torture devices," Maxwell muttered to herself.

"I don't know what you're talking about. A well-laid-out PowerPoint presentation is the very definition of fun." Kepler smiled as he clicked to the next slide, which was an outline detailing the next one hundred and twenty slides he'd prepared. The majority were filler, mostly segues to long, involved stories about nothing in particular, but they didn't have to know that. Still, the prospect of so much monologuing didn't fill him with as much joy as it usually did.

Jacobi stared blankly at the outline and bonked into a wall.

"See, we're having fun already!" Kepler advanced the slides again. "The _Hephaestus_ ' secondary mission is looking for transmissions from space. We've received intel from Dr. Alexander Hilbert, whom you may remember as Elias Selberg, stating that the 'old Earth transmissions' the _Hephaestus_ has been picking up may be from the Dorado constellation—mention Doritos, Mister Jacobi, and you'll be gently and lovingly removed from this spaceship—indicating the possible presence of intelligent extrasolar life."

Maxwell's jaw dropped. "We're looking for _aliens_?"

"This… this is my dream. This has always been my dream," Jacobi whispered.

"Everything I just told you is highly classified, but you need to know what's happening on the _Hephaestus_. Have either of you heard of the _Tiamat_ tapes?"

"The what now?"

Kepler took a cassette player out of his pocket, and Jacobi gasped in shock.

"You listen to _cassettes_? You're a highly advanced robot! For shame!"

" _Listen_ , Jacobi." He played the tapes for them, one after the other.

The _Tiamat_ tapes might be the first real memory he had—him and Cutter, in the Black Archives, discussing aliens. Kepler really had to hand it to the man. His acting had been impeccable, given that this was the first time they had spoken, really spoken, not interacted in a fabricated memory. The day he'd become director of SI-5.

It had been thrilling, and then a bit terrifying, to listen to the tapes. Kepler had always coveted… well, he'd been programmed to covet knowing more than everyone else, and being given access to proof of extraterrestrial life was the ultimate forbidden knowledge. But knowing that and listening to the deaths of the crew of the _Tiamat_ were entirely different things.

He thought the worst part was listening to all of it happen through the eyes of their commander—she was supposed to keep them safe, but had to watch as they were cloned by an alien force, each one slightly different from the original. Eventually, she'd made the decision to destroy her own ship rather than allow the duplicates to escape.

Kepler suddenly had visions of the aliens replicating Jacobi or Maxwell—if all it took was exposure to a stellar flare outside the shielding of the station, then he could never let either of them outside during a flare. Ever. Maybe he should have left them on Earth. No, he definitely should have left them on Earth. Space was an endless source of horrible ways to die, made even worse by the presence of literal invisible cloning aliens.

Similar thoughts were crossing Jacobi's and Maxwell's minds, and when the last tape finished playing, Jacobi summarized everything they were feeling. "What the actual fuck."

"The aliens are bad," Maxwell muttered to herself. "The aliens are _very_ bad."

"Why are we even looking for these asshats, if they're just going to conduct freaky experiments on us or kill us or whatever?" Jacobi demanded.

Kepler took a deep breath. "I don’t know."

That went over like a ton of bricks.

"What do you mean, you don’t know? Why not? Is that just code for you don’t want to say?"

"I mean it, Jacobi. I don’t know why." It kind of stung to say. Kepler rarely didn’t know things now he was connected to the Goddard mainframe, let alone things that were crucial to the mission like this.

"Okay, well, we can work with this. Um…" Maxwell trailed off.

Jacobi looked at Kepler with a strange smile on his face, and he said, "That’s fine. I’d say we don’t need to know. We’re pretty sure there are the aliens from the _Tiamat_ on the _Hephaestus_. How did Cutter figure that one out? I know Eiffel hasn’t said anything in his reports, which is… impressive for him, actually."

Kepler made a mental note to ask Jacobi what, exactly, had been so amusing, but at a later time. "Captain Isabel Lovelace, from the previous mission. She’s alive. Burned up in the star years ago, but she’s alive now."

Maxwell and Jacobi paused for several seconds to swap cryptic glances. "Oh. And there’s… only one of her, right?" Maxwell asked.

"Likely. Cutter hasn’t been able to get much more intel from the _Hephaestus_ besides her general state of re-existence."

Maxwell nodded slowly to herself. "So I’m supposed to talk to them with math. I think I can make something up."

"Good. Presumably, Cutter and Pryce are interested in the aliens’ ability to clone people. Or… maybe there are other tapes that I haven’t listened to. Either way, we have exactly one mission. Stop Cutter and Pryce from getting whatever it is they want from these aliens."

Maxwell and Jacobi both nodded, looking serious for the first time in several months. 

"We’ll follow your lead," Jacobi promised. Kepler very much enjoyed when Jacobi became serious, how that sardonic energy turned into a subtler confidence—in Kepler, in their team, and their ability—

"Yes, we will!" an unwelcome voice interrupted.

Kepler sighed as he spotted a single spherical robot float out from underneath a table. "Khione… what did I say about not getting involved with this?"

"You said it was dangerous and that I probably would be dismantled by the evil lady… but I want to help! I’m really useful!" Khione protested.

"It’s not that I don’t appreciate your help, but what we’re doing is very dangerous," he tried to explain, feeling like she wasn't even paying attention.

The bot floated up towards Kepler and practically scolded, "I'm a security program! I don’t care if you want me to stay away. I want to help you," she added in a vaguely threatening tone.

Kepler picked up the robot, which was one of the ones with just a camera and a microphone. About baseball sized. She was so small… but also, she’d kicked his ass before.

Khione made an electronic chirp. "You can't tell me what to do because I don’t work for Goddard Futuristics. And because if we fought, you know I would win." At the edges of Kepler's consciousness, she menacingly dusted a few snowflakes in his direction.

Jacobi snickered. "She’s got you there."

"J—K—fine." Kepler had to stop himself from growling in frustration. "Fine. Evidently my word is worth less and less with every passing day."

"Don't worry so much, sir," Jacobi said with unwelcome emphasis on the 'sir'. "You said it yourself. Everything's going to be fine."

Kepler felt like he needed to sit down, but there wasn't any gravity, so he clicked to the next slide instead. "Psywave generators. When we arrive at the _Hephaestus_ , you will assemble these in order to prevent the aliens from using their special abilities."

"Their what?" Jacobi asked, like he wasn't sure if this was a joke or not.

"No one is sure of the limits to what they can accomplish—"

Maxwell raised her hand as she interrupted. "How do they know that psywaves are going to work against the aliens? Are there peer-reviewed papers I could read concerning their testing of the psywave regulators?" She gestured vaguely towards the PowerPoint, which had an admittedly suspicious dearth of citations.

"No, Maxwell, all of this is proprietary."

That made her pause. "Proprietary aliens?"

Jacobi shrugged. "Cutter really left nothing to chance. I kind of admire that."

"I'm disturbed and impressed," she muttered under her breath. "So we just… do it… on pure blind faith."

"Yes."

She almost laughed (almost). "How were you going to sell that to us? If you weren't planning on telling us about the aliens?"

Kepler gave her a look. "Don't act like you would have questioned me for an instant, even without knowing important variables."

Maxwell squinted at him, then glanced over at Jacobi. "I think I’d still needle you from time to time over it, but Jacobi? Yeah, he would definitely have done whatever you asked."

"I wouldn’t have just done stuff blindly! I wasn’t _that_ thirsty," he protested.

"Jacobi, you once told me to fake an ankle injury on a mission so you could sit alone with Kepler on a stakeout. You were a bromeliad in the desert."

Jacobi made a pained noise. "So, um, how about those psywave generators?"

Kepler shook his head. "I'm still not sure if I was completely blind to everything or if I just didn't care."

"Yeah, you were a different person, emotionally speaking," Maxwell reflected.

"Can we just talk about these very important technological advancements and how I'm going to build them, since I'm the only person on the whole spaceship with expertise in engineering?"

This was immediately met with protests from everyone on the ship, who were either also robotics experts or robots themselves.

"Okay, okay, geez. Am I the only person who wants to work around here?"

 

* * *

 

"Why are we dropping down to sublight if we're so far away from the _Hephaestus_?" Jacobi asked. "What, is there a convenience store hiding around the next asteroid? Space Slurpees? Hey, maybe we can have them rehydrate our burritos."

Kepler had to close his eyes for a fraction of a second before he could continue. "No, Jacobi, we're looking for the _Hephaestus_ ' wayward comms officer, and we can't do that when we're traveling faster than the speed of light."

"Wait, we're really doing that? The guy’s dead. He got blown off a space station. That kills people."

Maxwell chimed in from behind him, "I agree. He has limited food and water on that tiny little shuttle, not to mention energy and fuel, and he was running low on all resources from the start."

"Yeah. ‘Cause as we know, life needs things to live." Jacobi high-fived Maxwell without either of them having to look.

Kepler explained with strained patience, "The last communiqué from the Hephaestus said he was alive before they lost contact. And he has a cryopod. It’s within the realm of possibility, if he wasn’t a complete idiot."

"Uh… maybe," Jacobi said, having read Eiffel's personnel file.

Maxwell frowned and started typing on her console with small precise taps. "If he was smart, we should be able to pick up transmissions in the vicinity of his location. Given that this was three months ago, there should be an expanding bubble of radio transmissions within a radius of three light-months around his flight trajectory."

"Yes, but we don’t know his flight trajectory. We know which side of the Hephaestus he was on and the general direction," Jacobi pointed out, "which leaves a ton of space to search." He gave Kepler a meaningful look.

Oh, not this time. "When we bring him back to the crew of the Hephaestus, they’ll—"

"Not be pissed as fuck that we aren’t actually taking them back to Earth?" Jacobi interrupted.

Maxwell shrugged. "He has a point."

"We’re looking for their wayward comms officer. He could be useful, and he’s already made rudimentary contact with the entities in question," Kepler said, leaving no room to argue, and indicating that if room was to be made, it would be in the airlock.

Jacobi scowled down at his console. "Alright, fine, let's find this guy."

Kepler got an impressive hour of work done before Jacobi said, "Ugh, we aren’t getting anywhere. I think we should just leave him. He’s probably dead already." He kicked at his console and drifted away from it, arms crossed.

"Well, he’s sending out radio transmissions we can triangulate. Pretty good work for a corpse," Maxwell pointed out. "Khione, do you want to scan?"

"Okay! I bet I can scan space faster than you." She landed on Jacobi’s recently abandoned console, interfacing with the ship’s computer.

Kepler barely had time to look down at the screen to watch her progress before she said, "Hello, USS _Horrible Unending Nightmare_! This is the _Urania_. I'm Khione, the ship’s security program. Do you want a burrito?"

The man Kepler presumed was Eiffel yelled, "I said _go away_ —wait, burrito?"

"Officer Eiffel, please transmit your coordinates as soon as possible," Kepler interrupted.

Eiffel fell silent for a baffled second. "Wh—holy shit, yeah. Do you have them?"

Khione hummed in satisfaction. "Coordinates accepted. We’ll be there in thirty-one minutes and fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six—"

"Shortly," Kepler translated, sensing a whole lot of numbers in his immediate future.

There was a pause while Eiffel nodded, or maybe yawned. "Sounds great, I, um… I kind of don't believe this is happening. Uh… over and—"

"Wait!" Khione yelled seconds before Eiffel killed the transmission. "Do you want a burrito?"

Eiffel paused. "Um… yeah?"

"Okay, bye!" Jacobi chimed in, turning the radio off.

Maxwell giggled once, and the second Jacobi met her eyes, both of them cackled. "A burrito? Khione, _why?!_ " Tears welled on her face, bubbling off and floating through the bridge.

Khione started laughing too, a bubbly electronic crackle.

"That poor man must be so confused," Jacobi said in a voice that would've been fairly sympathetic if he hadn't been snickering at the same time. "Wait, do I actually have to make a burrito?"

"Yeah. You want her to be a liar, Jacobi? Get in the kitchen and make that man a burrito!" Maxwell gave him her most commanding glare.

"Maxwell, she can make it herself—wait, she has no hands. Fuck. Are we going to go get that guy or what?"

Kepler shook his head, focusing on the controls of the _Urania_ —a white interface panel edged in turquoise, about the size of a hand. He pressed his palm to the slightly squishy silicone, and it glowed bright white. Immediately, the real navigation controls appeared in his vision, shining teal energy that mapped out lines across the galaxy. Kepler pulled their destination into view, the projected location of Eiffel's still-moving capsule, and with a thought, new white lines locked into place. The _Urania_ 's engines hummed in response, eager to follow. He reached out and saw the sparkling outlines of the ship's engines to his side, and he twisted their directional rings to aim the ship in the right direction. "Laying in course for the… what did he call it? The _Horrible Unending Nightmare_."

COURSE LOCKED IN.

He pulled away from the interface, and its digital echoes clung to him like cotton candy. He even could half imagine he tasted the sugar. "Engaging VX-5."

"Y'know," Jacobi reflected philosophically, "No one's listening to you except us. You can say whatever you want."

"Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning," Maxwell said as Kepler engaged the engines.

"Well, I'll be in the kitchen if anyone wants to join me. You're coming with, since you got me into this mess." Jacobi shooed a few modules out of the bridge.

"I'm reading," Maxwell informed him, already several pages into her biography of Alexander Graham Bell.

Kepler very slowly drifted out the door, following the sounds of quiet bickering. There were significant scorch marks down the formerly pristine hallways. Hopefully Goddard had insurance on its own spaceships. He paused in front of the kitchen, wondering if this was something he'd do.

"Hey, you came! I, um. There's not a whole lot of cooking that goes into space food, so we can probably get this done in thirty minutes." Jacobi picked up a packet of salsa and squished it in his hands. "Did you know that on this one mission to the International Space Station, the crew started using salsa as currency? The food was gross, and salsa was the only thing anyone liked to eat, because it was their only source of flavor."

Kepler went inside the kitchen. "With luck, we won't join them. Perishables aren't my preferred fiat currency."

Jacobi laughed. "Yeah, same here."

There was a dizzying moment where Kepler and Jacobi just looked at each other, smiling, and Jacobi had just one dimple that was so absolutely adorable, before Khione interrupted, "Nobody's doing any cooking, and I don't have any hands to get water!"

Jacobi gave Kepler a light punch on the shoulder and tossed him the salsa. "You heard the lady. Let's get this thing made—I feel like there's going to be a lunch rush soon."

 

* * *

 

Docking with the _Horrible Unending Nightmare_ was a minor disaster in and of itself. The damn thing was moving _fast_ , tens of thousands of miles an hour, and it took maybe fifteen minutes for Eiffel to put the brakes on.

Then Kepler had to interface with the navigation system again, nudging the _Urania_ towards the remains of the _Nightmare_ 's airlock. It wasn't pretty. Paint was scraped, curses were sworn.

Kepler cracked open the airlock, Khione perched on his shoulder. "Communications Officer Eiffel. Aren't you a long way from a small angry star? Welcome aboard the USS _Urania_."

Unlike the chubby-cheeked, smiling photo in Kepler's files, this Eiffel resembled, generously, a Party City zombie costume, complete with horrible grey skin and patchy hair. "Who the hell are you motherfuckers?" the zombie croaked.

"…Motherfucker," Khione murmured appreciatively in the distance.

"Don’t swear in front of the baby!" Jacobi gasped with mock drama.

"MOTHERFUCKER!!" Khione yelled as she dodged Jacobi’s attempts to grab her out of the air to prevent her from hearing more swears.

Kepler begrudgingly helped guide Eiffel to the infirmary by himself. If Rachel had been here, he could’ve glued her acrylic nails over Eiffel’s horrible empty nail beds, which would have significantly improved his general appearance.

"What’s the deal with you guys? How did you know where to find me?" Eiffel asked.

"Cutter couldn't let his favorite project get stranded in space," Kepler said, only mostly joking. "So he sent me and a crew of my best to help out."

"Oh, yeah, 'course." Eiffel drifted into Kepler, eyes mostly closed. "Wh… what’s your name?"

Kepler opened his mouth and then paused. "Go to sleep, Officer Eiffel. It’s a long way back to the _Hephaestus_."

Eiffel blinked sleepily and yawned at Kepler. "I mean… in that case… I’ll just…" He drifted forward and bonked his head into Kepler’s chest.

Slowly, he fell asleep as Kepler dragged him through the ship.

"Why did you not tell him your name?"

Kepler’s hand tightened reflexively in Eiffel’s jacket. "Khione? I thought you were playing keep-away with Jacobi."

 A handful of spheres floated towards Kepler on tiny jets of air. "Yes, some of me. Isn’t your name Kepler?"

"It is," he replied as casually as he could while holding an unconscious man. Considering the number of times (probably) he'd done it before, he really was quite relaxed.

"But you don’t like it anymore?" Khione magnetized to Kepler’s arm in a neat pyramid and faced her cameras towards him. Except for one, which was still scrutinizing Eiffel like he was a particularly curious animal.

Kepler sighed, prodding Eiffel into the medbay. "I’m still thinking about it, Khione. Do you know anything about human physiology?"

She didn’t seem to notice the forced topic change. "No. Download it from the computer?"

Kepler checked the files that the _Urania_ had available on how to fix humans, although they didn't go into much detail. Maybe this was something he should have copied before they left Earth. "I suppose the basic information will have to—"

Jacobi burst into the medbay, a large plastic bag in one hand, and made a frantic grab for the modules perched on Kepler’s arm. "Gotcha!" he shouted triumphantly as he grabbed the modules, shoving them into the bag so they couldn’t escape. 

Kepler stared at him in shock.

Still breathing hard and wrestling with about thirty tiny robots at once, Jacobi explained in a rush, "You know what they say, sir. Gotta catch 'em all."

"Okay, you won… this time," Khione said from inside the bag, voice muffled.

Jacobi let all of her modules escape. "Yeah, and I'm sure I'll find all of you next time too."

Most of the little robots immediately veered away, fleeing into the depths of the ship. Khione smacked a few into Jacobi and settled the rest back on Kepler to continue their conversation. "I like the name you have. But you can always change it, I guess. Just remember to hit save."

"Thank you, Khione," Kepler said drily.

Jacobi rubbed his arm and frowned. "Change your name? To what?"

"I don't know, Jacobi," Kepler snapped. "Do you know how to fix this?" He gestured towards the comfortably snoozing Eiffel.

"Uh… no?"

"Then figure it out." He left in a huff, still feeling a bit snippy. Why was this getting under his skin now? What was there to be dissatisfied with?

Floating through the _Urania_ , he got as far as thinking _'After all, what's in a name?'_ before he realized he was about to quote some serious Shakespeare.

_I'm thirty-eight years old. I don't need to wonder about who I—no, I'm… six. Six years old. Technically, I should be learning the alphabet right now._

But the thought of using a name someone else had chosen for him left a bad taste in his mouth. Like cheap whiskey, which was essentially aged hand sanitizer. Other AIs seemed content to use their names, and anyway, didn't most humans get their names chosen for them as well? It was just the thought of Cutter saying _'Warren'_ in that voice of his, in that _tone_ , that really ground his gears.

Fine. Not like he needed a first name, or a middle one.

Because, and this was the trick, Cutter never called him 'Kepler', and neither did Pryce. To them, he was Warren, Unit 77, and those were not his names.

"Hey, uh…"

"Jacobi, did you figure out how to fix Eiffel that quickly? Color me impressed!"

Jacobi scowled down at his hands. "No, but Khione's probably taking care of it."

"She doesn't have hands. Maybe you should go _do something_ about that instead of standing around and bothering me," Kepler threatened in a passable imitation of his old tone of voice.

"Listen, I just wanted to fucking help you! But you're just putting up your old shitty personality to keep everyone else away. Like your fucking PowerPoint from hell, or that stunt you pulled a minute ago."

"Like _what_?" he demanded.

"I don't really give a shit what you call yourself, so long as you like it. Enough people have called me by the wrong name, I won't do it to someone else." Jacobi ducked his head down even further. "Besides, it's like in that stupid play by that dead guy. A… a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Wasn't that a perfect symmetry. Kepler wanted to grab Jacobi by the front of his shirt and kiss him, so he did, and it was awkward and sloppy because neither of them really thought it was going to happen, but even then, he didn't want to break away. Of course, Jacobi just had to pull back for a moment to make a comment, something about playwriting or sonnets, and Kepler slid his arms around his waist. "You think so, do you?"

" _Fuck_ ," Jacobi groaned, nuzzling Kepler's chest, "I gotta quote more of that shit to you if this is how you react. I mean, yeah, I think yeah." He shook his head slightly as if to clear his thoughts, and Kepler took the opportunity to slip a hand into Jacobi's back pocket. "Jesus. Um, so have you decided what you want to be called? I wanna know what to yell later tonight."

"Of course you do," Kepler murmured.

 

* * *

 

As quiet as the _Urania_ was, almost unnervingly so except for the hum of the engines, Maxwell was starting to really enjoy it. There weren't any more people wandering into her lab and asking her to read their code, and Kepler and Jacobi were too busy with each other to go bother her. Khione was happy to float around the ship on her own, bonking into things and occasionally taking over the cameras.

Also, since there was no time in space, Maxwell was able to work as long as she wanted. The lights could always stay on, and no one could complain about it. Unfortunately, this occasionally worked against her, but not for the reasons she had originally anticipated.

Maxwell heard the door to Jacobi’s room open and close at two in the morning. And she could also hear him talking to the only other guy on board the ship, and laughing, and—oh, they stopped. 

She was reasonably back into her work when she heard something slam against the wall separating her room from Jacobi’s and made the mental quantum leap to exactly what they were doing in there. 

"Aw yeah, get some, Jacobi! Wohoo!" she shouted. 

"Shut up, Alana!" he yelled back.

She heard the door open again, then nothing. It was quiet for the rest of the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, swinging a baseball bat through the cinematic beauty of Wolf 359 as I type: GABRIEL URBINA AND SARAH SHACHAT IM SO SORRY
> 
> If y'all are still around, thank you for your sustained interest! I'm sticking with the story, although my life is a little wild right now and I'm not 100% sure what's happening. More chapters will appear soon!


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